


Season 1, Episode 1: Wrath of the Mind

by Peaches and RAmen (Peachy00Keen)



Series: Star Trek: Babel [2]
Category: Star Trek, Star Trek - Various Authors, Star Trek Online
Genre: Action/Adventure, Aliens, Andorians, F/F, F/M, Gen, Gliesians, Human, M/M, Medical, Multi, Original Character(s), Original Fiction, Other, Science, Science Fiction, Star Trek References, Star Trek: Babel, Tellarites
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-04
Updated: 2020-06-29
Packaged: 2021-02-27 20:55:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 24
Words: 25,729
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22562116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Peachy00Keen/pseuds/Peaches%20and%20RAmen
Summary: Babel is faced with a medical mystery when the starbase at which they intended to resupply is found running on emergency power with its inhabitants barely alive. The ship's medical staff is pitted in a race against the clock as they search for a way to stop the contagion that swept the base from spreading before it's too late.
Series: Star Trek: Babel [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1623328
Kudos: 6





	1. Chapter 1

_Captain’s Log, Stardate 48538.7: We are two days out from our scheduled arrival at Starbase 214, at which point we will resupply and depart for our exploratory mission in uncharted space beyond the borders of the Federation. All seemed to be going well until we stopped receiving transmissions from the Starbase yesterday. They have not answered our hails, and I have instructed my crew to commence long-range scans of the station, in order to detect any unusual emissions that might interfere with communication, or any debris if the worst has occurred._

Raj frowned as he stared at the incoherent data from the sensor logs. “What do we know so far, Miss Benson?”

“Well, sir,” the small, black-haired woman began shakily, “it’s difficult to tell with any real degree of certainty, but the station appears to be there, just kind of… dead in the water, I guess you could say. I’m picking up some trace energy signatures, but they’re extremely faint. It’s almost like all but their bare minimum systems seem to be offline.”

“Some sort of engineering failure, maybe? Can they receive our hails?”

“If they can, they haven’t been. Considering the number of people capable of working the comms on a starbase, it seems unlikely that they are choosing to ignore us, Captain.” Renetta turned around and shrugged, struggling to maintain eye contact with the stern-looking man. “Either something took out everything but emergency life support or the majority of people on board are out of commission in some way. Maybe both. Whatever the case, all I can say for sure is that Starbase 214 is still there and unresponsive. If I had to guess, a gamma-ray burst or an ion storm could have easily knocked out their electrical systems. On the other side of the scale, I suppose they could have had some sort of core malfunction that caused everything to short out and take out the power after overloading the internal grid. It’s not really my area of expertise in that case, but it seems plausible enough. Sometimes things don’t get repositioned correctly during maintenance and nobody finds out until it’s too late.”

The ensign turned back to her station and looked over the readings once again. “Until we get closer, I won’t be able to see if there are any life signs on board, though I hope we’ll see plenty once we get within range. Best-case scenario, they’re all alive and trying to fix the problem. Worst-case scenario…” She trailed off. “I’ll let you know when I have more information, Captain.”

“Good work, ensign. Keep scanning and notify me if there are any changes. Ensign Brahms, increase speed to Warp 8.” He tapped his combadge to open a line to Engineering. “Murali to Naazt, can we maintain Warp 8 until we reach Starbase 214? They appear to be having some sort of emergency.” There was a brief pause before the Chief Engineer responded.

 _“Naazt here, Captain. I wouldn’t recommend it, but as long as you don’t plan on going anywhere for a while once we get there,_ Babel _can handle it. I’ll let the crew know and make a few changes down here.”_

“Make it so, Lieutenant. I want us there within twenty-four hours. Computer, locate Lieutenant Commander O’Malley.” 

_“Lieutenant Commander Shannon O’Malley is currently in Ten-Forward.”_

“Bridge to O’Malley.”

_“O’Malley here. What do you need, Captain?”_

“Commander, we’ll be arriving at Starbase 214 in twenty-four hours. They appear to be having some sort of engineering failure. I need you to assemble an away team to investigate and assist as soon as we arrive. Ensign Benson will send you the relevant data from our sensor scans as we get closer.”


	2. Chapter 2

Shannon stuck a spoon in her coffee and swirled the cream into the dark liquid, watching it blend with silent satisfaction. The synthesized Irish cream wasn’t the same as the stuff she could get back home, but it was a pretty good mockup. Besides, she had no desire to drink real whiskey-laced coffee before her shift. Licking the remaining liquid off of the spoon, she set it down, convex side up, on the bartop, and took a sip. The drink was the perfect temperature, and the warmth that flowed through her was pleasantly invigorating. For someone who had always been more of a morning person, taking on a midday shift was a change of pace. She found herself saddled with far more free time than she knew what to do with. Until she settled into a proper routine with either more work or a better idea of what to do for fun, Shannon had resigned herself to sitting with a cup of coffee and thinking.

The doors of Ten-Forward swished open and shut as a familiar figure walked casually through the door. His eyes scanned the mostly-empty room and he grinned when he found the First Officer sitting at the bar.

“Well, if it isn’t our own Miss O’Malley,” Jeremy Caldwell said in a singsong voice as he approached the bar. “Mind if I join you, Commander?”

“Not at all,” she said, grateful for some company. “What brings you here?”

“Lunch break,” he said with a bit of a forced smile as he took a seat beside the First Officer. “I just wrapped up a conference with the other heads of staff in the science department. It was supposed to end two hours ago.”

The bartender swung by passing a glance over Shannon’s coffee cup to see if she needed a refill before taking Jeremy’s order of a burrito and a chilled glass of root beer. When the lieutenant turned back to face Shannon, she looked like she was about to burst.

“What?” he asked, his smile holding but his brows furrowed in confusion.

“A burrito and a soda? You realize the replicators can make just about anything, right?”

“Yes, and I would like them to arrange some atoms into a burrito and a soda. Is that such a crime?”

Shannon shook her head and took another sip of her coffee. “Not in the slightest, Lieutenant. You ought to try a Reuben sometime. Now _that’s_ comfort food.”

Jeremy shrugged. “To each their own, I suppose. I’ve never been much of a corned beef guy.”

“No!” Shannon exclaimed, setting her mug down with a loud clack. “And here I thought you were a reasonable person. I’ve been horribly deceived.”

“Hey, I’m not going to stop you from eating your pickled cow,” he said defensively to the commander, nodding in a polite aside as the bartender delivered his lunch. “But you don’t get to harp on me for enjoying my comfort food.”

Their friendly dispute was interrupted by the chirp of her combadge. _“Bridge to O’Malley.”_

“O’Malley here. What do you need, Captain?”

_“Commander, we’ll be arriving at Starbase 214 in twenty-four hours. They appear to be having some sort of engineering failure. I need you to assemble an away team to investigate and assist as soon as we arrive. Ensign Benson will send you the relevant data from our sensor scans as we get closer.”_

“On it right now, Captain.” Shannon closed the channel and turned back to Jeremy. “Well, Lieutenant Caldwell, it seems my shift is starting just a little bit early today.” She downed the rest of her coffee and stood up. “Your company has been a pleasure, as always. I’ll see you around.”


	3. Chapter 3

Ensign David Brahms surrendered his station to the beta shift flight controller and made his way to the turbolift, where he was joined by the young science officer who’d spent most of the shift talking with the captain. Benson, he remembered after a moment of thought. She was short, a bit reserved, and reminded him vaguely of a classmate of his at the Academy. _I think I spent more time paying attention to her than to any of Professor Thorpe’s quantum mechanics lectures..._

“Um, you’re not going to Deck Twenty-Five as well, are you? There’s nothing but science labs down there.”

David jumped at her comment, then smiled sheepishly as his face began to turn red. “No, sorry. Just lost in thought. Computer, Deck Twenty-One.” He hesitated for a moment, words suddenly light-years away from him. _Come on, David, at least talk to the girl this time!_ He stuck out a hand awkwardly. “I’m David Brahms. I know I’ve seen you around a few times, but I don’t think I’ve had the chance to introduce myself.”

“Hi!” She shook his hand firmly. “Renetta Benson. I’m… I’m the ship’s quantum theorist, I guess. I never really thought about it in context before…” Renetta trailed off for a moment before picking back up where she left off. “You do look familiar, though I can’t say where from. It’s nice to meet you, though!”

“Quantum theorist? Ok, I know this is a stretch, but you didn’t happen to take freshman quantum mechanics with Thorpe, say, six years ago?”

“Hmm…” she said, rocking back and forth on her heels, her hands clasped over the PADD in front of her. “Yeah, I think I did! Is that where I know you from?”

“I _knew_ I recognized you from somewhere! What are the odds, right? Sorry again for not introducing myself earlier. We’ve been underway for almost a month now, but everybody’s been so busy, and... sorry, now I’m babbling on again. I always end up doing this. You’d think on a starship of this size, it’d be easier to get to know people, but most of the people on the bridge are so much more experienced, and kind of hard to talk to. It’s nice to see somebody else my age around here. I guess what I’m trying to ask is... do you want to get lunch or something some time?”

“Oh,” she said, taken aback. “Y-yeah. That’d be really nice actually. I’d love to.” The whirring of the turbolift began to slow. “When?”

“How about tomorrow, after our shift?”

Renetta smiled. “Tomorrow it is.” The turbolift doors whooshed open. “I’ll, uh, I’ll see you then!”

“It’s a date, then!” David’s face paled as he realized what he’d just said. “No, that’s not what I...” It was too late, the doors had already closed, leaving him hopelessly flustered at the turbolift entrance on Deck Twenty-One. He started walking toward Holosuite 9 in a daze, determined to make the best of his scheduled hour despite the anxiety quickly building in his stomach. 

As an officer, albeit a junior one, he was entitled to reserve the larger full holodecks on Deck Eleven, but it felt wasteful to use such a large and often coveted holodeck for his own recreation. “Computer, begin program Brahms Four.”

 _“Please specify user craft,”_ the computer replied.

“Federation Type Nine shuttlecraft.”

A sleek, nimble looking Starfleet shuttle materialized before him. It was _technically_ still classified, according to his cousin Leah, but since the model had officially been deployed with the first _Intrepid-class_ starships earlier that year, she’d managed to get a copy of the specifications for him as a graduation present, and as a send-off before _Babel_ departed. He’d flown it a few times now, just in shakedown sims, and still felt in awe every time he looked at the ship. It was low, aerodynamic, and more responsive than any ship he’d ever flown in his life. He stepped into the cockpit and settled into the pilot’s chair with a palpable sense of relief. He ran through the ship’s startup procedure as the holosuite around him faded into the starry black of open space. A lone blinking beacon ahead of him marked the start of the course.

 _If only flying from the bridge felt as calm as this,_ he thought as he took the craft through a tight double loop, then rolled to avoid a chunk of rocky asteroid. _No captain to make me question my every move, nobody looking over my shoulder. And here there’s at least something to do. I’ve barely made so much as a course correction for the last month. At this rate, the only impression I’ll make on anyone is if I fall asleep at the helm._ The debris that marked the course boundaries began to tighten, and a pair of blinking icons on his display marked the guided missiles meant to encourage a speedy pace. He throttled up by twenty percent as he dipped the shuttle’s nose toward the opening of a windy tunnel just ten meters in diameter. He banked easily into the first turn, a downward sloping left, then braked into the following hard right. His mind wandered off of the bridge and back onto the turbolift. _Renetta. I spent a whole semester looking at her instead of paying attention in class, and I never even learned her name until today. Of course, if I hadn’t been so distracted, maybe I would’ve_ passed _quantum mechanics and spent the next two years in the Academy instead of flying a freighter. And now I’m having lunch with her tomorrow? What am I going to say? After my stupid_ date _comment, I’ll be lucky if she even comes. Damn it, David, why are you always such a mess around girls?_

A flash of white brought him back to reality, and he looked out the viewscreen at the yellow holosuite grid in confusion. “Uh, computer... what happened?”

_“Simulation has reached its conclusion.”_

“Conclusion? I had at least another twenty kilometers left. What caused the end of the run?”

_“Analysis: The starboard nacelle collided with tunnel segment forty-six gamma at time interval-”_

“Thank you, computer,” David sighed. “Run simulation again.” _This time, keep your head together,_ he thought to himself as the starfield returned. He let out a long breath and set the throttle to maximum impulse as the starting beacon beckoned him a second time.


	4. Chapter 4

_Power readings: Minimal. Life signs: Almost normal. No enemy ships in the sector, no sign of combat, no response to our hails. None of it adds up._ Shannon puzzled to herself about the data displayed on the PADD in her hands as she walked toward the bridge. _Bringing on a security officer would probably be smart since we have no idea what might be waiting for us over on the starbase. Based on the engineering data we’ve been able to gather, something appears to be malfunctioning, so having someone from engineering with us to assess the damage would also be good. Other than that…_

In her peripheral vision, Shannon saw another figure walking down the hall in her direction and looked up. “Lieutenant Barnes, are you busy at the moment?”

The slim, stern-faced lieutenant’s face flickered briefly in annoyance before settling into her usual calm demeanor. “Not if you need me for something, Commander. What can I do for you?”

“I’m assembling an away team to take to the starbase and I think it would be prudent to have you along with us. Aside from that, I’d like your opinion on the other team members. I have Lieutenant Naazt with us to assess any system damage, but I’m struggling to think of a fourth crew member to bring with us. The biosignatures onboard the base are mostly within normal parameters, but I still think we should have someone with biological or medical expertise with us just in case. Bothering our Chief Medical Officer seems unnecessary, but I was thinking that having Koltak along with us could be of use.” Shannon lowered her PADD, on which she had pulled up Koltak Rygelix’s personnel file. “Are there any suggestions you would make to that group?”

Jessica took a look at the PADD and skimmed the contents. “He… it? They? Sorry, I’ve never worked with a Gliesian before. Yes, they look like a solid choice to round out the team. Why are you so interested in my input, though? You _are_ the First Officer, after all.”

“Even those in command sometimes seek the input of their specialists.” Shannon took back her PADD. “As Chief of Security, I wanted to know whether or not you thought this away team would be better outfitted with heavier security rather than a variety of specialists to assess the problem. I heard you arrived onboard _Babel_ with wounds from a holodeck program. I wanted to be certain I didn’t need a second security officer with me.”

“I’m perfectly capable of providing security for a team of four on a Federation starbase, Commander. Do we know anything new from the sensor scans I should be aware of?”

“All we’ve managed to ascertain is that they are operating at low power for some reason and that their life signs are showing within the normal range. It could be anything from a generator malfunction to some kind of system diagnostic that requires a long-term reset for whatever reason. There is no reason for us to suspect that there is anything harmful onboard Starbase 214, but the fact that we’ve had radio silence from them for so long concerns me.”

“I agree. I’ll make sure we’re ready when the time comes to beam over tomorrow morning. Is there anything else, Commander?”

“That should be all.” The first officer nodded as she moved aside to continue on her way to the bridge. “Enjoy the rest of your day, Lieutenant.”


	5. Chapter 5

A day came and went surprisingly quickly. _Babel_ came within transporter range in just twenty hours, despite the engineering team’s objections to overworking the warp core, and Jessica heard the away team assembly call just after she rose from her bed. She took a five-minute sonic shower and quickly donned a fresh uniform in security gold. Picking up the phaser she’d checked out of the armory the night before and holstering it at her belt, she left her quarters behind and made her way to Transporter Room 3, where her away team waited. _No, Commander O’Malley’s away team,_ she reminded herself hastily as she nodded to the older woman already standing on the transporter pad.

To the Commander’s left, Jessica saw the polychromatic Gliesian scientist Koltak Rygelix, standing at attention with a tricorder in hand. To Shannon’s right, and Jessica’s left as she stepped onto the platform, was the ever-irritable Tellarite, Naazt, carrying a full toolkit and furiously chewing something while waiting for them to depart. She gestured at his toolkit. “Chief, you know this is just a survey mission, right? Find out what’s going on before we get to work?”

The Tellarite harrumphed loudly and set his toolkit down. “One should always be ready to start working, Lieutenant. Assuming that all is clear over there, I intend to stay aboard the starbase and begin work immediately. My team can beam over and join me once the Commander gives us the go-ahead.”

“Speaking of,” Shannon spoke up, “I think it’s about time we get moving.” She nodded to the transporter chief. “Energize.”

Her vision began to blur as the blue-white field engulfed her. Of course, she physically felt nothing as the transporter ripped her apart molecule by molecule, beaming her body’s physical matter and quantum-stored consciousness over twenty kilometers to be reassembled on the transporter pad on Starbase 214, but she still _believed_ she could feel a slight tingle, one that persisted until she felt her boots solidly on the floor again. She stepped forward immediately to survey the area. She hadn’t expected to see a transporter chief on-duty when they arrived, but seeing the room completely empty still seemed wrong. A quick look told her there was nothing immediately hazardous, and she turned back to the rest of the team.

“Area clear, Commander. I’d suggest we make our way to Ops. We can question anyone we find along the way.”

“Agreed,” the first officer said with a nod. “I find it strange there was no one here to greet us, but I have a feeling it has to do with whatever has been keeping the crew from answering our hails.”

They made their way out of the transporter room and into a desolate hallway. In emergency power mode, the lights were dim, adding to the eerie atmosphere of the seemingly deserted section of the station.

“I’m picking up life signs ahead, Commander,” Koltak said, looking intently at their tricorder. “They’re human, but show the same slight variations we saw in _Babel_ ’s scans. I do not know what those variations mean.”

Jessica stepped forward. “If I may, I’d suggest you let me scout ahead, Commander.”

Shannon nodded. “Be careful.”

As she rounded the corner, Jessica had a moment to take in the strange scene before jumping back to avoid a phaser beam meant for her head. A pair of durasteel containers had been moved to block most of the wide corridor, which was manned by two armed Starfleet security officers. 

“Hold your fire!” she shouted at them. “I’m Starfleet!” 

“Sure you are, lady,” a gruff man’s voice replied. “That’s just what you want us to think. We’re not crazy, you know. Not like the rest of them.”

“What do you mean, ‘like the rest of them?’ We’re from the _USS Babel_ , we just arrived. What’s going on around here?”

“Don’t listen to her! Get away from us!” the other man shouted, his voice pitched high with panic. He fired another phaser beam into the wall just past her, forcing her to retreat a few feet from the hallway intersection. _What the hell is going on here?_ Drawing her phaser, she set it to stun. She fired two shots blindly above the containers, then rolled to the opposite side of the hallway. Rising into a crouch, she fired again, stunning one of the officers. She rushed forward and slid up against the container the second man was hiding behind. She waited for him to appear above her, and caught him by the wrist, twisting the phaser out of his hand and levering him over her shoulder. She felt his shoulder pop, then downed him with her phaser. “All clear, Commander,” she said over her combadge. “Though we appear to have quite the situation on our hands.”


	6. Chapter 6

The rest of the away team emerged from around the corner with Shannon leading the way. She brought the team to a halt in front of the container barricade and knelt down beside the unconscious man. Nothing about him looked abnormal.

“Koltak, are you picking up anything unusual about the area or our friend on the ground here?”

The science officer flipped open their tricorder and scanned the area. “My scans aren’t showing anything out of the ordinary, Commander.” They turned and scanned the man on the ground. “There doesn’t appear to be anything wrong with him either, though that variation in the standard biosignature is still there and unaccounted for.”

“Can you give me anything else?”

Koltak shook their head and closed the tricorder, “not without different equipment. Standard tricorders are not the same as medical tricorders, so if there is something going on at the genetic level, for example, I wouldn’t be able to tell.”

Shannon sighed and tapped her combadge. “O’Malley to _Babel_ , two to beam directly to sickbay.” She watched as, a moment later, the two bodies disappeared in a shimmer of blue-white static. The first officer turned back to her away team. “Alright, while we haven’t got much to go off of at the moment, we know that there’s a decent chance that whatever is going on has made the crew very skeptical of one another. Be alert and set your phasers to stun as a precaution. Let’s keep moving toward Ops.”

The group continued down the deserted hall toward the central command area of the starbase. Occasionally, Shannon stole a glance out the station’s windows. _It’s amazing how easy it is to forget just how dark space is when you live on a starship. When the lights go out and the nearest stars are light-years away, there’s nothing to illuminate the shadows. Depending on how long they’ve been running on emergency power, I wouldn’t be surprised if everyone on board had lost their minds jumping at the sound of their own footsteps in the dark._ The first officer staggered to a halt as the toe of her boot collided with the back of her security officer’s.

“I see movement up ahead,” Jessica said in a low voice laced with mild irritation. “If I may, I’d like to scout ahead again.”

“How many bodies do you see?”

“It’s hard to tell with so little light. Three? Maybe four?”

“It might be better if we moved as a unit if there are that many.”

“You’re assuming they’re hostile.”

“You’re assuming they’re not, which considering our greeting, might not be the wisest choice.” Shannon kept her voice quiet enough that it wouldn’t carry far, but she made sure that her tone was clear. “I’m not suggesting we go in there with phasers drawn, but I do recommend we proceed in a defensible manner. If all of the people down that hallway are armed and decide to attack, a single Starfleet officer is going to be fairly easy to hit.”

“Fair enough. After you, Commander.”

“Koltak and I will approach from this side of the hall and announce our presence so we don’t startle them. Lieutenant Barnes, Naazt, if I remember the station map correctly, there should be a smaller hallway that runs adjacent to this one and connects farther down. If both of you can take that passage to flank them silently and back us up if they do turn out to be hostile, our odds of surviving a volley of phaser blasts is much higher.”

“Give us three minutes to get there and we’ll have your back, Commander,” Jessica said with a nod before beckoning the squat engineer to follow her. Within moments, the pair disappeared into the shadows.

The silence between Shannon and Koltak as they waited for the other half of their party to reach their destination was tense. The last time the two officers had met, their interaction had been less than pleasant. Desperately, Shannon tried to think of something to say.

“I read in your file that Gliesians are able to see far more colors than the average human,” she began helplessly. “Do you find that to be helpful in situations like this?”

Koltak did not respond immediately. “I cannot see in infrared, nor can I visually process heat, Commander, so no, my tetrachromacy isn’t particularly helpful when there’s no light.” They paused before adding, “I’m as blind as you are, sir.”

Shannon decided against any further questions and waited out the remaining couple of minutes without another word. Once it was time to move, Shannon called out down the hallway from behind a corner.

“Is anyone down there? This is Lieutenant Commander Shannon O’Malley from the _USS Babel_. We’ve been hailing you for days with no response.”

Her announcement was met with panicked screams and shrieks as the people gathered in the shadows took off in different directions like a flock of frightened birds. After the sounds of their voices died off in the distance, Shannon paged her security officer.

“Barnes, what’s your status?”

 _“We’re fine, Commander.”_ She sounded distraught. _“What the hell was all that about?”_

“I have no idea. We had better hurry to Ops in case whatever is going on here is getting worse. Hold your positions, we’ll meet you there momentarily. O’Malley out.”

The team regrouped at the intersection down the corridor and took off at a jog toward Ops. What they found on arrival was worse than they had anticipated. Crew members were strewn about the department in various poses. Some looked like they had simply collapsed where they stood while others appeared to have fallen in the middle of a scuffle. A few bore scratches on their faces and hands, though there didn’t appear to be any life-threatening injuries as far as Shannon could tell at a glance.

“Koltak, are they alive?”

The Gliesian already had their tricorder out and was scanning the room. “Yes, Commander. All of them still appear to be alive, though their readings are extremely weak. It’s as if they’re all comatose.”

Shannon took a deep breath and tapped her combadge. “O’Malley to Doctor Dupont, we have a medical emergency. I need you to send over a medical team immediately. There are about a dozen people over here who all appear to be in a coma.”

_“Understood, Commander.”_

“What is going on here,” Shannon asked to nobody in particular as she entered the room and walked toward the main console. “Maybe there’s something in the logs that will make some sense of this.” The computer took a moment to cultivate the starbase commander’s logs. When they first appeared on the screen, Shannon thought the files might have been corrupted or otherwise compromised. The text was garbled and incoherent, but as she backtracked, they began to make more sense. The most recent entry she could read was from four days ago, one day before _Babel_ first hailed the starbase.

_Commander’s Log, Stardate 48526.2_

_We have completed negotiations with the Brevhal trade ship and received a shipment of fusion coils in exchange for the replenishment of fuel reserves and dilithium. Chief Engineer Graves assures me that the fusion reactor will be back online in a day or so, and we have enough reserve power to last nearly a week in the event that the reactor completely fails. I’m a bit concerned about the workload of the engineering crew lately, but frankly, I can’t afford to give them a break until we get up and running again. For now, I’ll just pretend I didn’t hear his last comment when I asked him for his report._

Every entry following that one made progressively less sense until the logs devolved into mismatched words and rogue punctuation. Whatever caused the panic on board the starbase happened after the shipment of fusion coils arrived, shortly before _Babel_ began hailing them. That left a window of roughly 24 hours for the madness to set in.

Shannon turned back to the away team to report her findings. “Based on what I see here, the power failure is due to an issue with some of the fusion reactor’s generator coils. They received replacements from a Brevhal trade ship four days ago, but considering the station’s power levels, they were either never installed or they were faulty.”

“What about the mental state of the crew?” Jessica asked.

Shannon shook her head. “Nothing. If I had to guess, it’s probably some kind of paranoia due to sensory deprivation. These people have been wandering around in the dark for four days. For most sane people, complete visual and auditory deprivation can lead to incredible paranoia a matter of minutes. These people have been stumbling around in almost total darkness for days. With the base running on emergency power only, most of the white noise generated by various onboard systems has been greatly reduced to save energy, and because we’re out in an isolated sector of space, ship traffic is practically nonexistent.” The first officer looked down at the unconscious Andorian at her feet. “The weird responses we’ve gotten from the people we passed make perfect sense when you consider the fact that they’ve been feeling their way around in the dark for so long. Based on the Commander’s Log, the power failure must have happened sometime in the roughly twenty-four hours between the time of the entry and our first hail to the station. More likely, it happened before the shipment even arrived, otherwise the engineers would have fixed the generators before the station was plunged into total darkness.”

“Then it sounds like the first order of business is going to be getting the coils back in working order,” said Naazt gruffly.

“Your sensory deprivation solution is very interesting, Commander,” Koltak interjected, “but how does it explain a dozen people lying comatose on the floor?”

“Well,” Shannon faltered, “it doesn’t, but that’s why there’s a medical team on the way. Naazt is right, though. If we want to make any headway toward a solution, we should head to Main Engineering to take a look at the fusion generators.”


	7. Chapter 7

When the away team returned, Raj reviewed their preliminary report before calling a meeting with his senior staff. As he took his seat at the head of the conference room table, he nodded to his first officer, seated to his immediate left. 

“Good work over there, Commander. It seems things are worse than we had anticipated, but you were able to recover the station logs and gain control of Ops and Main Engineering. Mister Naazt, what can you tell us about the situation in Engineering?”

The Tellarite looked up from the seat next to Shannon. “The station suffered a cascading failure in the fusion reactors which took the entire station’s power grid offline. They still had, and have auxiliary power, but they’ve been using it for all systems over the last few days. Based on the logs, and what we found in engineering, they bartered for a new set of fusion coils to repair the grid from a local trade vessel. For frontier stations like this one, it can take weeks for Starfleet to get even critical supplies delivered, and they didn’t have the time. Trading with the locals is a common, if not officially sanctioned practice. Unfortunately, they never completed the repairs.”

“What happened to them? Commander O’Malley’s report mentions acute paranoid behavior, along with dozens of crew members effectively comatose from some unknown medical condition.”

“That’s the thing,” Shannon said, leaning back in her chair as she reached a hand up to scratch the back of her neck. “The acute paranoia makes sense given their living conditions, but nothing I could think of accounted for their vegetative states.”

“If I may,” Doctor Dupont interjected from across the table. “My medical team analyzed the comatose patients and found evidence of a contaminant that seems to affect brain function. We have yet to perform a biopsy, and we’re still running tests on the patients in sickbay, but it would seem to me that whatever triggered their shutdowns came onboard with the shipment of coils. I can’t imagine any other source of contamination.”

“Could this contaminant be a threat to _Babel_ or her crew?” Raj asked, suddenly much more alarmed.

“Presumably not,” the doctor said, shaking her head. “From what we can tell, there are no antibodies in the comatose patients’ systems to indicate an active infection. The two crew members your away team encountered when they first arrived also showed no signs of an active infection, which leads me to believe that whatever caused the neurological reaction has come and gone already. What does concern me is the rapidly deteriorating state of the comatose patients on the starbase. If they do not receive medical attention soon, they will certainly die. I don’t have space in my intensive care unit for so many patients, but I won’t be able to find a cure for them until I have a sample of the source contaminant. It would seem that the problem started when those coils arrived. Either whoever delivered them was a carrier for this mystery ailment or their cargo is tainted. Whichever the case may be, I believe the next thing we must do is find those traders, Captain.”

“I agree, Doctor. In either case, they could easily be spreading this to their other trade partners. We have a duty to stop this from hurting anyone else, not just our own people on the station. Commander O’Malley, I want you to track down this trading vessel. I’m not familiar with the Brevhal, but the station’s records should give you enough information to find them. Take a shuttle and come back with a sample. Mister Naazt, what do you need to complete the repairs to the station’s fusion reactors?”

Naazt snorted. “Only time, Captain, and a few of Lieutenant Barnes’ security officers to keep the crazies at bay.”

“Erratic behavior or not, Lieutenant, they are Starfleet crewmen and officers, and they are in need of our help. Miss Barnes, assign a security detail to the station’s engineering section and Ops. Our priority is getting the reactors online and restoring life support. The station can only maintain an oxygen atmosphere for a couple more days, and with our limited medical staff, evacuation won’t save the crew if we fail. Mister Naazt, Miss Barnes I expect a report every four hours with an update. Doctor, do what you can to learn more about your patients. Miss O’Malley, do whatever it takes to get a sample and return as quickly as possible. I want you underway within the hour. You’re dismissed.”


	8. Chapter 8

The moment the beta shift science officer arrived to take her place on the bridge, Renetta could barely make it to the turbolift before nearly exploding with excitement. She’d found it difficult enough to focus on the sensor data, but once David had been relieved, every extra moment she spent working felt like an hour. Finally off-duty, she felt like the turbolift couldn’t reach Deck Two fast enough. As soon as the doors opened, she hurried out and down the hall at a brisk pace.

Renetta pressed the button beside the doors to her quarters and they whooshed open. As soon as they’d closed behind her, she grabbed the bottom of her uniform shirt and started pulling it over her head as she walked toward the bathroom.

“Computer,” she said as her head emerged from the collar of her shirt, “play some orchestral music for me.”

_“Please state planet of origin.”_

“Earth.”

_“Please state musical era.”_

“Classical.”

The sound of violins and piano filled her quarters. “I ought to just ask her to play Mozart and save us both the trouble,” she muttered as she hopped hastily out of her pants, stumbling into the doorway in the process. Taking a deep breath, Renetta stepped into her sonic shower and felt the pulses surround her. Between the drone of the sonic shower and the classical music playing outside in her quarters, Renetta was finally able to slow her mind enough to think.

“Okay, let’s take a second and calm down a bit,” she reasoned with herself. “You know he probably didn’t mean it as a _date_ date, and even if he did, it’s best not to assume. I know he _said_ date, but he tried to take it back at the last second… But that was probably because he’s kind of a shy guy. I get that. I’m pretty bad at being social outside of work most of the time. No problem. Still, I can wear something nice-ish, right? I mean, not crazy fancy, we’re just going to Ten Forward, but I mean, even if it’s not a _date_ , I can still dress date-ish…” She sighed and turned off the shower. “Just not over the top, I guess.”

Renetta stepped out of the shower and mentally explored her wardrobe options. She decided on a steel blue cowl neck sweater and a pair of fitted black pants. Hurrying back into the bathroom, she assessed the look in the mirror. “It’s cute, but it’s not ‘hey, I’m here for a date, are you into me?’ cute. I mean, I guess it kind of is, but I suppose that’s sort of the look I’m going for.” She narrowed her eyes and thought for a second before gathering her hair up in a messy ponytail. “That’s a little more casual and slightly less sultry, I guess.” Still dissatisfied with the look, she pulled a single strand of hair down and let it hang in front of her ear. “There.”

Throwing on a pair of black ankle-height boots, Renetta hopped toward the door as she eased her foot into the second shoe, getting it on just in time for the doors to slide open. At the fastest pace she could manage without running, she made her way to the nearest turbolift and directed it to Deck 10. She picked up her hasty pace as soon as the doors opened, slowing to a normal walking speed a few feet away from the door. Her eyes scanned the room as she entered, looking for her “date.” She found him sitting at a table by the windows, staring out at the stars. Excitement wiggled its way back into her bones, but she quickly drew in a deep breath and did her best to calm her nerves before walking toward where David sat waiting.

 _I feel a little better knowing he took the time to change out of his uniform, too,_ Renetta thought as she breathed a sigh of relief at his choice of a loose-fitting rust-colored sweater and black pants. _I guess I got lucky with the dress code. It would have been really awkward if I’d shown up in casual clothes and he was still in his duty outfit._

Nervously, she walked up the few steps to the upper level and approached the table. “H-hi, David,” she said in a squeaky voice, mentally scolding her vocal cords for failing her at such a crucial moment.

“Renetta!” he said, standing hastily to greet her. “It’s good to see you! I mean, I know we were just on the bridge together, but... okay, wow, I’m sorry. I just can’t seem to speak today. You look great! Uh, do you want to get something to eat?”

 _Oh, thank goodness I’m not the only one of us who’s ready to jump out of their skin._ She smiled wide as she took a seat across from him. “I’d love to. You picked one of the best seats here. It’s a good place to sit when you want to think about big things. Space makes everything seem small.” She paused rather abruptly. _Maybe don’t go all existential on him_ right _away._ “Uh,” she scanned the room for a waitress and waved a hand once she’d made eye contact. “You know, long shifts always make me hungry. I think it’s all the thinking and the worrying.”

The waitress took their orders and went back toward the bar, leaving the two alone again. David smiled at her from across the table. “So, uh, how have things been for you so far? It hasn’t exactly been an exciting month at the conn, but I imagine the science labs are at least pretty active.”

“Oh, you have no idea,” she said with an exasperated sigh. “The readings from Starbase 214 have had me tossing and turning in my sleep. Supposedly, they figured out the engineering problem, but the biosignatures have been nagging at me nonstop. They’re mostly normal, but ‘mostly’ isn’t ‘normal’ enough for my liking.” Renetta groaned quietly and leaned back in her chair. “I prefer physics over data analytics. At least when my numbers vary in physical calculations, I can blame the fickle nature of baryonic particles, you know?”

“Uh, yeah... I’m not sure I can follow the physics like you can, but it sure sounds exciting. When the captain heard the away team had returned, he seemed pretty stressed, you know? I wonder what they’re discussing in the senior staff meeting right now.”

“Being Captain has to be a pretty stressful job in general. I’m not sure I could ever handle it. Whatever the case, we’ll probably hear talk of it on our next shift.”

A communicator chirp from David’s shirt interrupted them.

_“O’Malley to Ensign Brahms. Please report to Shuttlebay One immediately.”_

David hit his combadge regretfully. “Immediately? Where are we going?”

_“I’ll give you a full debrief once you get here, but we need to track down another ship and we need to do it quickly.”_

“Aye, ma’am. I’ll be right there.” He looked across the table at Renetta with a pained expression. “I’m really, _really_ sorry, but it looks like I have to go. I don’t suppose we could try again when this has settled down?”

She felt her heart sink. “Y-yeah,” she said, trying not to sound too disappointed. “I mean, as long as you want to. I don’t want you to feel like you’ve been roped into having lunch with me or anything. It’s fine either way, honestly.” The last word came out slightly choked. Lying had never been something she was terribly good at.

“I really _do_ want to, and I promise I’ll make it up to you,” he said, nearly crashing into the waitress who had just arrived with their food. “Sorry again, but we’ll try again soon!” He sped off through the door and out of sight.

Renetta watched him hurry off as a painful lump rose in her throat.

“Oh… Honey…” the waitress said, setting the tray down on the vacant side of the table, sliding Renetta’s cup of spice tea across to her. “Here, drink up. It happens to the best of us.”

“I don’t even know what to think,” she said, her voice tight as she stared into her cup of tea. “I mean, I know it wasn’t anyone’s fault, but talk about bad luck on a first date, if that’s even what this was.” Renetta sniffled and took a sip of the perfectly-warm beverage. “I even wore my favorite sweater…”

“Hey now, don’t dwell on it too much. That’s life on a starship for you. He had to rush off to save the day this time, but he said he’d be back.” The waitress made eye contact with another server and waved a hand in some vague gesture that Renetta didn’t understand.

“How do I know he wasn’t just saying that to be polite?”

The freckle-faced blonde woman smiled. “Oh, I’ve seen that face before. He meant what he said. Trust me.”

The waiter from a moment before appeared at the table with a bowl of ice cream, setting it down in front of Renetta with a wink.

“What’s this for?”

“Nobody eats gumbo when they’re sad, sweetie,” she said, picking up the tray as she got to her feet. “You enjoy your ice cream, and if you still want your seafood once it’s done, I’ll be happy to bring it to you.” She reached a soft hand over and gave Renetta’s arm a squeeze before walking back into the bustle of the lunch rush.

Renetta looked down at her sundae and sighed as she picked up the spoon. _Maybe she’s right. Maybe I am jumping to the worst conclusion. Once all this has settled down, we can try again._ She took a bite of strawberry ice cream. _For today, I think I might see if there’s an open reservation on a holodeck. A few laps or a quick game might help me clear my head a bit._


	9. Chapter 9

David ran through the hallway in a hurry, apologizing to the pair of startled crewmen he’d leaped past as he made his way to the shuttle bay entrance. When the door opened for him, he found Commander O’Malley already waiting for him next to a Type-8 shuttlecraft. The Type-8 was a long-range shuttle, fast, and everything David appreciated in a craft of its size. Nothing in Starfleet compared to it, save for the Type-9 he’d flown in the holodeck. _USS Lee, NCC-71119-5,_ its registry read across the side and nacelles. He stopped himself from admiring the shuttle and focused on the woman giving him an irritated look, waiting for them to depart.

“Sorry I’m late, Commander. If you have everything we need, we can leave at any time.”

The first officer looked him up and down as the irritation faded gradually from her face. “We should depart immediately.” Shannon turned and proceeded toward the shuttlecraft’s door. “Did I interrupt something?”

David felt his face flush at the thought of Renetta sitting across from him at Ten-Forward, with that captivating grin on her face. “I, uh, just lunch with... a friend. I had to run back to my quarters to change into my uniform.” He opened the shuttlecraft doors and hurried into the pilot’s seat, flying through the pre-flight checks. “Hop in, Commander. We’ll be out of here as soon as you tell me where we’re going.”

“Uh-huh,” Shannon said slowly as she took her seat, handing him a PADD with coordinates. “Well, from what we’ve been able to tell, whatever is going on with the crew of Starbase 214 is somehow tied to the shipment delivered to engineering by Brevhal traders. We’re to lay in an intercept course for the ship and rendezvous with them as quickly as possible. Doctor Dupont needs a fresh sample of the pathogen so that she can run tests and determine a cure for the comatose crew members.”

He took the PADD and started his flight calculations. Based on the Brevhal ship schematics, he estimated that it would take them roughly ten hours to overtake them at the shuttle’s maximum cruising speed of Warp 4, assuming that the trade ship continued without stopping along their usual flight path. After receiving clearance to depart from the bridge, he lifted the _Lee_ gently off the deck and shot out of the shuttle bay with as much speed as the thrusters would give him. He throttled up the impulse drive and rolled to port, lining himself up with his flight trajectory before making the jump to warp. _Finally,_ he thought to himself, _a real mission, and a chance to do something,_ but as soon as he found himself getting excited, the guilt came back to him in the form of Renetta’s pained face as he left her behind in Ten-Forward. _I’m sorry, Renetta. Please forgive me, and give me another chance._

They had been at warp for close to an hour before the silence was broken.

Shannon shifted in her seat to stretch her legs. “Geez, Ensign, you’re going to give me a headache with your incessant chatter over there.” She looked over at him assessingly. “What’s on your mind? You’ve been uncharacteristically quiet.”

“Oh, sorry Commander. I was just thinking, I guess.”

“Thinking about what?” Shannon asked, raising an eyebrow. “I’ve watched you do course calculations on the fly before, and I’m willing to bet you could fly this shuttle in your sleep. You look like you’re about a million light-years away.”

“Just thinking about lunch, I suppose. We had just ordered food when I got your message.”

“Right, your lunch with a _friend_ ,” she said, putting emphasis on the final word. “You seem terribly preoccupied with this missed opportunity for a totally platonic lunch meeting with a fellow crew member.” Shannon turned to look forward, not making much of an effort to conceal the traces of a grin on her face.

“Okay, so it was sort of a date, I guess,” David managed, as his face flushed abruptly. “I mean, it wasn’t _supposed_ to be a date, but then I said the word date and the turbolift door closed, and... I don’t know what it was going to be.”

“Did you want it to be a date?”

 _Did I?_ he wondered, looking nervously around the shuttle interior to avoid looking directly back at Shannon. “I don’t know,” he said finally, letting out a deep breath. “I don’t see too many people my age around the ship, and honestly, I was just trying to make a few friends. Something just stuck out about her, though, and every time I saw her on the bridge I could have sworn I knew her from somewhere. Eventually, we realized we took a class together back at the Academy. I guess I did sort of want it to be a date, I think... I don’t really know how I feel. I’m sorry, Commander. I don’t want to bother you with my complete failure of a social life.”

“Nobody’s perfect, David. I have my own shortcomings.” Shannon shrugged, “At least you talk about yours.”

“I have a hard time believing that you have many shortcomings, Commander.”

“Everyone has something they could work on. For me, I don’t think I’m a terribly good leader. At least, not in a position of general authority. I’m comfortable in my element, but command is _very_ much not my element.”

“Really? You look like you’re in your element on the bridge. At least, you look more confident than I feel.”

“I guess I’m good at pretending then, huh,” she said with a chuckle. “To be honest, I still don’t know that I agree with my appointment to _Babel_ ’s command, but one doesn’t really get to dispute orders from the Admiral.” Shannon turned and draped an arm around the headrest of the chair and looked at him. “You say that I look more confident than you feel, but I wouldn’t know you didn’t feel confident just by looking at you.”

“Uh, permission to speak freely, Commander?”

“Granted.”

“I feel confident when I’m flying a shuttle, or even flying _Babel_ as long as I don’t look around the bridge too much. I know I’m a good pilot. What I’m not good with is people, especially my superior officers. When I first met you and had to shuttle you to Mars, I was _terrified._ I kept waiting to slip up, to make some stupid mistake in front of you, and convince you I wasn’t fit for the job. On the bridge, it’s like that, but with _everyone_. The Captain is... well, he’s intimidating. I know I made it through the Academy, but I still worry that I’m not cut out for Starfleet.”

“I think Captain Murali could make some Vulcans feel uncomfortable,” Shannon laughed. “I feel the same way you do, and I’m his First Officer. Try not to let him get to you. He may seem a bit cold and prickly, but he’s not so intimidating as long as you stick to protocol and keep the chatting off-duty and away from him.” She got up and walked to the replicator. “Everyone I’ve met on board this ship has been far from perfect, so you and I are not alone in our feelings, I’m certain.” Shannon returned to the front of the shuttle and handed David a glass of water with a smile. “I bet even Renetta feels a little intimidated sometimes.”

David nearly spilled the glass at the mention of Renetta’s name. “How did you...?”

Shannon snorted. “There are currently six hundred people aboard _Babel_ , seven of whom are regularly on the bridge with you. It wasn’t exactly the toughest mystery to solve.” She smiled and leaned back in her seat, “I’ll tell you what. Once we track down this freighter and get back to our ship, I’ll make sure you have a block of time where you won’t be called away so you can make good on that date.”

“Thanks, Commander. I appreciate the thought.”

Shannon held up her index finger. “Don’t thank me just yet. My offer comes with one condition.”

“A condition, ma’am?”

“Give the girl a proper date. Your undisturbed time off will be between the hours of seventeen-hundred and nineteen-hundred, as soon as I can make it happen.”

“Uh, yes ma’am. I will.”


	10. Chapter 10

_"Doctor, another patient was just beamed into Main Sickbay. What should we do with them?”_

“Main Sickbay, as I’m sure you are aware, is full to and beyond capacity. Move them to Secondary.”

_“We just filled the last bed in Secondary, ma’am.”_

“Then pull out a gurney and put them on that.”

_“All the gurneys are taken by patients resting in Main.”_

“Then replicate more, Ensign. Must I direct you through every step of the process?”

There was a brief pause on the other end of the communicator. _“No, ma’am. I’ll send one of the emergency recruits to get more. Ensign Dansville out.”_

Clara sighed and rubbed her temples as the communicator went silent. Both sickbays were full to capacity, they were out of beds, and pretty soon, the unconscious bodies would be overflowing into the hallways. She was thankful that nearly half of the ship’s crew had emergency medical training. If there was one thing Starfleet was good at, it was preparedness. Previously, she’d never had the luxury of calling for more help when the hospital was overwhelmed. Here, all she needed to do was call for more emergency recruits and, like magic, she would have more hands on deck.

On its own, the starbase’s medical crisis was enough to give someone a pounding headache. Having to micromanage staff members and the emergency recruits on top of it all was grounds for a mental break. Trying not to dwell on the ordeal, Doctor Dupont turned her attention back to the aggregate brain scan data on the screen before her. The nu-complexes in each patient’s brainwave patterns had been typical of comatose brain activity, and the blood samples she’d gathered from several patients showed no increase in white blood cell count to indicate the presence of a pathogen. _So what could leave almost an entire starbase unconscious?_

Her communicator chirped again and Clara felt her jaw clench reflexively. The ensign’s voice from earlier came through. He sounded winded. _“Doctor, we managed to bring back a patient who’s still conscious. They’re raving, but they’re still with us.”_

“Bring them to Main Sickbay at once and have someone clear a biobed.”

_“Ma’am, there are people on all of those--”_

“And I said to make one available. They need to be hooked up to a neurocortical monitor and have a blood sample drawn immediately.” She turned off the screen in front of her and grabbed her blue lab coat off the hook by the door to her office.

 _“I don’t think they’ll stay still enough for any of those things.”_

“So restrain them accordingly, Ensign. I’ll be there shortly.”

The moment Clara stepped out of her office, she found herself weaving through a sea of gurneys, all of which contained unmoving bodies with eyelids. If each gurney didn’t show a live readout of their vitals, she’d have thought them all dead. The room was eerily silent except for the beeps and blips of the heart rate monitors. Outside the door, she could hear screaming. _That must be the newcomer. Wonderful,_ she thought, imagining how much she’d soon miss the rhythmic beeping.

The doors to sickbay opened and the sound of the wailing was immediately unbearable. A couple of the emergency medical recruits had made short work of clearing off the surgical bed and bringing over a tray containing a neuro monitor as well as a syringe for a blood sample. Clara looked to Ensign Dansville and the exasperated-looking emergency recruit who was helping him transport the manic patient. Thankfully, the ensign didn’t seem to need further instruction on what to do this time, and the two hauled the starbase crewman over to the empty biobed, taking extra care to secure the thrashing man to it.

Clara approached the table once the patient had been secured and calmly placed the neuro monitor on the frantic man’s head. “Dansville,” she said as quietly as she could over the screaming, “retrieve a blood sample and deposit it in the system for analysis.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, quickly picking up the syringe.

“Sir,” the doctor said to the patient as she began to initialize the readout. “Do you know where you are?”

“You’re all part of it!” The man screamed, his voice breaking occasionally between words. “You’re all part of the conspiracy! They’re hiding in the shadows! Lurking in the darkness!”

“Who is in the shadows, sir?” Her tone remained level.

“Don’t you know?! They’ve been there for days. _Watching_ us.” He tried to turn his head but only his eyes moved. “They’re coming for us all. One by one, they’ll get us. I’ve seen it!”

The neuro monitor beeped as it began measuring the patient’s brain activity. His readings were erratic. A few moments later, as the central sensor cluster clicked into place, the crewman’s heart rate beeps were added to the room’s chorus. His heartbeat was a perfect match for his wild brain activity, beating at least twice as fast as every other heart in the room.

“I can see their eyes for only a moment, and then they’re -- POOF -- _Gone_! They’re in the shadows! They’re just waiting. _Waiting_! They’ll get us all, eventually! Even _you_ !” His heart rate spiked briefly as he sucked in a breath. “ _YOU_. How do I know you’re not one of them? How do I know this isn’t all just a trap! Let me go! I demand to be set free! You can’t keep me here forever! I’ll report you to Starfleet! I’ll--”

The room’s previous silence abruptly took over.

“What happened?” Ensign Dansville asked, looking from the patient’s readouts to Clara. A few of the other medical staff and emergency recruits turned their heads, startled by the sudden lack of noise.

She held up a finger as she watched the waveforms on the readout transition from a hectic array of spikes to a far more predictable Delta wave pattern. “They appear to have fallen asleep,” she said, unsure of her own response as she continued to stare at the screen.

“Asleep?”

“Yes, Ensign. Do you need me to say it again?” Clara turned around and looked at the man on the table. His eyes moved jerkily beneath the thing skin of his eyelids. He was, in fact, dreaming. “It appears he has dropped directly into REM sleep.”

“How? He was stark raving mad a minute ago.”

“If I knew, we would be much farther along toward finding a cure,” the doctor said icily as she picked up her medical tricorder and scanned the man’s forehead. “There’s no fever. It’s as if his body flipped a switch and went dormant.” She reached for his hand and squeezed a fingertip between her thumb and forefinger. He didn’t react.

“Is he comatose?” the ensign asked cautiously.

“No, his brain is too active for him to be in a coma. I’ll monitor him, but I suspect he may be on his way there.” She didn’t feel like explaining the nuances of the situation any further than she had to. Nevertheless, the ensign pressed on with his inquiries.

“Do we know what’s causing all of this yet? Is it a virus?”

She sighed. “Ensign Dansville, I do not know. It is nonviral, nonbacterial, and as far as I can tell, not at all attributed to a pathogen. Lymphocyte counts of patients are similar to those of any other healthy member of their species. Their bodies show no sign of infection, no sign of cranial trauma, and no sign of neurological damage.”

“What about unusual chemical buildup?”

Clara looked at him scrutinizingly. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, all the things you’ve mentioned so far have been part of any routine bioanalysis. You’ve checked neurological and physiological responses, monitored for changes over time, and searched for any possible traces of physical or pathogenic interruptions to normal bodily functions, but nothing you’ve said has indicated chemical tests.”

The chief medical officer glared at her subordinate. He was right, she had overlooked that possibility. “What good would that do?”

“Well, what if we’re looking at some kind of poisoning?” he asked. “It’s not impossible, right?”

“I suppose not,” she admitted folding her arms across her chest. “Who could have poisoned the whole crew in such a short window of time?”

The ensign shook his head. “I don’t think it was anything so direct or malicious. It could have merely been an accident.”

“That would be an incredibly unfortunate accident,” she said harshly, her patience wearing thin.

“I mean, what if there was some chemical residue on the shipment that made its way around the starbase?”

“How would you account for the gradual onset?”

Ensign Dansville chewed his lip, thinking. “Well, what if it was inert until it entered the body, at which point it was metabolized into something else? If the resulting molecule was small enough, it could potentially cross the blood-brain barrier and form deposits.”

This time, it was Clara’s turn to ponder. For as irritating as the young officer had been earlier in the day, she couldn’t ignore the fact that his proposal, as outlandish as it seemed, was the closest thing she had to a working theory. “If this chemical buildup collected along neural junctions, it could theoretically lead to a degradation of mental capacities. It wouldn’t be unlike how amyloid-beta plaques once built up in Alzheimer’s patients back in the twenty-first century.”

“Didn’t they find a way to reverse the buildup with some sort of enzyme?”

“Yes, but only if it was caught in the early stages. Late-stage patients could benefit from treatment, but after a certain point, too much damage would have been done to the neural network to completely restore what was lost. Brain cells can only repair so quickly. If too many die, the damage may be irreparable.”

“Okay, but--”

The patient on the table groaned and opened his eyes. His gaze jumped around the room, darting from one place to the next, focusing on nothing. His heart rate and breathing began to increase, and then, just as quickly as it had begun, he slowed down and drifted back to sleep.

Ensign Dansville looked to the doctor. “So he’s not in a coma.”

“I told you he wasn’t,” she snapped. “But what? You were about to say something.”

Startled by her rapid transition back to business, he stumbled a bit before finding his words again. “I mean, so, with Alzheimer’s patients, they could break down the amyloid-beta plaques with this enzyme. What if we were able to do the same with whatever is blocking the brains of these patients?”

“That’s assuming your hypothesis is true.”

He gestured toward the patients all around sickbay. “Scan them. Scan them and scan someone who hasn’t set foot on the starbase, ideally someone who hasn’t been in contact with any of the patients, just to be sure. Run a chemical analysis on them and see if there are any consistent differences.”

Clara tightened her lips and sighed. She had no other avenues left to probe. As far-fetched as the ensign’s idea was, there weren’t many other options left. Looking around the room, she wondered if the distraction was worth their time. On the one hand, it could be the answer they’d been looking for and it would bring them one step closer to finding a cure. On the other hand, it could consume an hour or more of their time and leave the men and women on the biobeds and gurneys one hour closer to death. Ultimately, it was a risk Clara decided she needed to take.

“Gather up enough medical tricorders to supply two small teams and take them to Engineering. Have someone there reprogram them to focus on compounds not needed for biological functions and bring them back to me. Get help if you must.” She tapped her combadge. “Doctor Dupont to Engineering, I need someone available to reprogram about six tricorders for me. It is urgent. I’m sending someone to you presently. Please be prompt.” Clara turned back to the young officer. “By the time you get back, I’ll have a team assembled. You will lead two other medical officers to scan as many unaffected crew members as you can in a half hour. I will stay here and scan the patients with my team and analyze your data as it comes back to me. I will call the Captain and request that unaffected crew gathers in Ten Forward to make your team’s job easier.”

“Why Ten Forward?”

“Because it is close to sickbay and everyone knows where it is. Now, stop dawdling and get those tricorders to Engineering. The longer you take, the longer it will be before I can start working on a cure for these people.”

“Yes, ma’am.”


	11. Chapter 11

“Status report, Lieutenant?” Raj asked irritably as he paced the bridge. His security chief handed him a PADD with Doctor Dupont’s current summary and instructions for the station.

“We’ve quarantined three levels of the station, sir,” Barnes replied. “My security teams are escorting Lieutenant Naazt’s engineering teams as they work to repair the station. Apparently the power grid failure damaged several relays across forty station levels, so the repair work has been slow. If they replace the coils before repairing the relays, we could do a lot of damage to the station.”

“What about life support?” Raj asked. “If we ran out of time, could we repair the coils anyway and still get life support back online?”

“Maybe,” she said with a shrug. “We don’t know the extent of the damage that a power overload could do, and this station is so old anyway, with so many non-standard replacement parts, that we simply don’t know what we might do by accident without repairing all of the damaged relays. You’d have to ask the engineers to be sure, but from what I know, it’d be a risky proposition at best.”

She was trying her best to stay alert and on task, but Raj could see the weariness beginning to take over. The past several hours had been hard on everyone, but with Shannon leading the sample recovery mission, most of the extra work had fallen on Jessica, who was hours into her third consecutive shift, and it showed in her bloodshot eyes.

“Thank you for the report, Lieutenant. Now go get some sleep while you can.”

“I can keep going, sir, at least until the Commander returns.”

Raj frowned. “Don’t make me make that an order, Miss Barnes. You’ve done more than anyone should rightfully expect from you, and I’m going to need that again from you soon. Get some rest. There will be plenty of work to do over the next day or two.”

“Yes, Captain,” she said with a sigh, before heading to the turbolift. That left only Raj, a helmsman from the night shift, and two others behind him manning the sensors and tactical. He eased back into the captain’s chair and begun skimming through Doctor Dupont’s observations and recommendations, marking key details for later review. _There has to be something we’re missing_ , he thought. _What contaminant could go undetected in a Federation starbase and leave most of its crew comatose?_ An image popped into his head, only for a moment, and he quashed the ensuing guilt with every ounce of will he had. _I will_ not _let these people die on my watch._

“Like you did to me?”

Raj spun around, but there was no one nearby. He scanned the bridge, only to find the same three officers, still at their posts.

“Did you say something, Ensign?” he asked the officer at tactical behind him.

“No sir,” the man replied. “Did you need something, Captain?”

Raj just shook his head. “No, carry on. Must have been my imagination.”


	12. Chapter 12

“That should be the Brevhal ship there in the distance, Commander,” David said.

Ahead of them, Shannon could easily make out the bulky silhouette of the freighter as it grew ever nearer. “Hail them and open a channel.” The ensign nodded when he had done so. “Brevhal vessel, this is Lieutenant Commander Shannon O’Malley onboard the Federation shuttle _Lee_.”

The viewscreen on the shuttle’s dash blinked as the Federation insignia disappeared and the squashed face of a [ Brevhal](https://i-h2.pinimg.com/564x/96/5a/34/965a340552a6d2f211b486a1998e23f4.jpg) took its place. “Good day, Lieutenant Commander O’Malley,” replied the Brevhal captain in a tight, nasal voice. “This is Captain Kheela of the freighter _Starskimmer_. What brings you out to this desolate part of the galaxy?”

“It has come to our attention that your ship was the last to have contact with Federation Starbase 214.” She watched his expression closely. “Their logs state that the _Starskimmer_ brought them an emergency shipment of fusion coils in exchange for fuel and dilithium. Is that correct?”

The captain tilted his head to the side and stared questioningly back at Shannon with unblinking eyes. “That is correct. Is there a problem, Commander?”

“When our ship, the _USS Babel_ , arrived at the starbase several days after your trade, we found evidence of a contaminant that was ultimately responsible for a medical emergency onboard the base.”

The dense frills on the back of the Brevhal captain’s head rose in alarm and his massive eyes seemed to grow even wider. He seemed to struggle in his search for an appropriate response. “What sort of contaminant?”

“We have yet to determine the exact nature of the cause, but we were able to trace it back to the arrival of the fusion coils.”

“I assure you Captain-- I mean, Commander, my crew is all perfectly healthy.” His crest began to flatten defensively as he shook his head adamantly in protest. “We would never willingly endanger any members of Starfleet, and we certainly wouldn’t want any harm to come to Starbase 214. We’d have no one else to regularly trade with in this sector if something happened to them, and they’re our only source of fuel for light-years in any direction!”

Shannon muted the comms and turned to David. “Well, even though they delivered the tainted shipment to the starbase, I think it’s safe to say that the damage that ensued almost certainly wasn’t intentional. The Brevhal aren’t known for their rabble-rousing tendencies, and if Starbase 214 is this ship’s primary trade ally in the sector, sabotage would be just as much an act of self-destruction as it would be an act of war.” She shook her head. “I believe someone may have set them up.”

David nodded. “I agree. If it was a setup, the best chance we’re going to have of finding out more is to inspect their ship, and hopefully a few containers of fusion coils, assuming they have more. If they weren’t set up... well, we still need that sample, and they could have already fired on us if they’d wanted to.”

Shannon unmuted the comms. “Captain Kheela, do you have any more fusion coils from that transfer that we could take for analysis?”

He hesitated for a moment. “If you think it would help. There are a few left in Cargo Bay Five that we can beam over to you.”

“Ensign Brahms,” she said, turning to David, “isolate a portion of the shuttle’s cargo bay and transmit the coordinates to the Brevhal vessel once the area has been sealed off.” She turned back to the Brevhal captain. “While we establish a quarantine zone onboard our vessel, Captain, might I ask from whom you received that shipment of fusion coils?”

“We traded with the Strux for them not quite a week ago,” he explained. “It was a special request on our part. Fusion coils aren’t something we usually keep onboard, but when we heard Starbase 214’s request, we responded at around the same time as the Strux vessel. Their ship was farther from the base but closer to us, so we arranged a rendezvous to trade cargo with them before we brought the coils to the Federation base.”

“Do you know where that vessel is now?”

The captain shook his head. “No, ma’am. We’ve had no contact with the Strux ship since the day of the trade.”

“Our cargo bay is ready to receive the shipment whenever you’re ready, Commander,” David interjected politely.

“Thank you, Ensign. Send over the coordinates.”

“Sending them now, ma’am.”

There was a moment’s pause while Captain Kheela arranged for the cargo’s transport, confirming it once the exchange had been finished.

“I regret to say we have nothing to offer you in exchange for the cargo, but provided it is undamaged during our investigation, we will certainly arrange to have it returned to you,” Shannon apologized.

The Brevhal held up his hands. “If it is what you need to ensure the wellbeing of those onboard the starbase, it would be rude of us to ask for anything but the eventual return of our goods. I like to think we’ve built an amicable relationship with the Federation so far. I’d like to keep it that way.”

“Understood,” Shannon replied with a nod. “Thank you for your cooperation, Captain Kheela. The _USS Babel_ will contact you once we’re ready to return your cargo or suitable compensation in the event it is damaged.”

“We wish you the best in your investigation, Commander. Kheela out.”

The viewscreen blinked back to the United Federation of Planets insignia and Shannon turned to her pilot. “Well, that went smoothly, but I fear it raised more questions than it answered. Let’s get those coils back to _Babel_ and hope they provide us with some solutions.”

***


	13. Chapter 13

Clara woke to the sound of her office door chime. She didn’t recall falling asleep, but the PADD sitting on the desk in front of her displayed a dark screen, meaning she either turned it off or hadn’t touched it in at least a half-hour. Her door chime sounded again. The older woman groaned and pushed the stray strands of hair out of her face before calling out, “come in.”

Ensign Dansville stepped into the room. The shadows under his eyes were dark and his hair was in disarray. The concern that had been written across his face morphed into disappointment, which he quickly attempted to conceal. When he spoke, a touch of jealousy remained in his voice. “Did you have a good nap?”

“What do you want, Byron?” Clara asked testily as she walked to her replicator and demanded a cup of black coffee at precisely fifty-eight degrees.

“Two crewmembers just checked in to sickbay. They say they’ve been overcome with extreme anxiety.”

“About what?” she sipped her coffee and pushed aside the mental fog that had rolled in during her unplanned nap.

“About everything. They said they just felt an overwhelming sense of doom.”

“Well, that’s unfortunate. Have they tried talking to the ship’s counselor about it?”

“Ma’am, why do I get the sense that you don’t believe this news to be important?”

“We don’t treat routine psychological ailments in sickbay, Ensign. You know that as well as I do.” Clara reached a hand up and tapped her combadge. “Doctor Dupont to--”

Out in the hall, a sudden blood-curdling scream ripped through the monotonous drone of Primary Sickbay. Clara dropped her coffee cup on the ground and she and the young officer took off running in the direction of the noise. The doors to sickbay flew open, revealing a scene of utter chaos in the hallway of Deck Twelve.

Two officers were writhing on the ground, their limbs tangled together in a violent struggle. A security officer Clara did not recognize had managed to wrangle _Babel_ ’s Gliesian science officer to the ground. A trail of purple blood streamed down from their temple where they had apparently been scratched. The same violet tint stained the fingernails of the security officer’s right hand, which the Gliesian had restrained by the wrist and held at arm’s length.

“What the hell is going on out here?” Clara shouted as Byron attempted to pry the officers apart. She ducked back into sickbay to grab a hypospray sedative. _I close my eyes for just a moment, only to wake up in a nightmare._

Ensign Dansville had managed to pull the security officer away from the science officer, who was now curled up in a ball on the floor. Though they were separated for the moment, the ensign struggled to maintain control over the maddened crewman.

“I trusted you!” the security officer screamed in a terrified, high-pitched voice. “How could you say something like that? What’s wrong with you, you monster? I--” He broke off mid-sentence as his body slumped against the young medical officer whose knees buckled under the sudden weight.

“You could have warned me first,” Byron grunted as he hoisted the man into a more balanced position.

Clara glared at the ensign and tapped her combadge. “Doctor Dupont to Secondary Sickbay, we need another gurney over here, at your earliest convenience.”

_“Sending someone over now, Doctor.”_

The Gliesian science officer was still lying in the fetal position on the floor. Clara crouched down and placed a hand on their shoulder. The officer flinched. “Are you alright?”

They moved an arm to peer up at the doctor. Fear filled their icy blue eyes as they shook their head.

“What is your name?” She asked softly, rubbing their back.

They shuddered. “K-Koltak.”

“Alright, Koltak, why don’t we stand up so I can clean your cut?”

“He wanted to kill me.”

“That man was very sick. He’s asleep now,” she said, looking over her shoulder at the unconscious crewman resting in the arms of the impatient and uncomfortable-looking ensign. “Let’s stand up, shall we?”

The Gliesian reached out a shaky hand to the doctor and slowly got to their feet. Physically, they towered over her, but their demeanor was about as fierce as that of a newborn kitten. “Why did he want to kill me? I don’t understand. All I said was that he looked tired. I said he looked tired, and then… and then he jumped at me. I don’t understand.” They gripped the doctor’s shoulder tightly. “I don’t understand what I did wrong!” Koltak drew in short, rapid breaths. The sound of footsteps running down the hallway made them jump, and the tall science officer let out another scream, the same as the one Clara had heard from inside her office.

“Alright, alright,” Clara hushed, taking Koltak by the arms and squeezing them against their torso. “Look at me. Koltak, I need you to look at me.” Her voice was firm, but her tone was gentle. “It’s just a medical team bringing a gurney from down the hall. It’s alright. How is your head?”

“Loud,” they said, their eyes darting between Clara’s gaze and the people in blue uniforms that had just rounded the bend. “My head is loud. There’s too much going on. Make it stop. Make it stop!”

With the help of the medical team, Ensign Dansville hoisted the security officer onto the gurney. “Restrain him and hook them up to a neuro monitor before you rouse him. Oh, and before you go,” he grabbed one of the modified medical tricorders off of his belt and handed it to the nearest medical officer. “Run a scan with this. It’s modified to pick up non-biological anomalies.”

The officer holding the device looked confused. “Certainly, but why?”

“We’re exploring all possibilities here. None of the bioscans have turned up anything unusual, so the next logical step would be to look for something chemical. Let us know if you notice any changes.”

“Of course.” With wary expressions, the team turned and left.

Ensign Dansville turned back to the doctor and her patient, who had begun to breathe normally again. “I don’t envy them,” he said, sounding relieved to have sent the unconscious man elsewhere.

“Just because he is out of sight does not mean he is no longer our problem, Ensign,” Clara said sternly. Koltak tensed and she sighed before softening her tone. “Nevertheless, I agree with your sentiment.”

“What if that happens to me?” Koltak’s voice sounded more choked than it had before. Clara slid her hands down their arms and held their wrists, discreetly feeling their pulse with a gentle squeeze. Their heart was still racing.

“There’s nothing to worry about, Koltak,” she said sweetly as she gently pulled them in the direction of sickbay. “Byron, would you be so kind as to grab us a gurney?”

“Uh, yeah,” he responded, sounding bewildered. “I’ll be right back with one.”

“Wonderful.” Clara smiled wearily. “Koltak, why don’t we go sit down in my office and chat until Ensign Dansville gets back?”

Slowly, she led both of them through the door, walking backward and keeping a close watch on Koltak’s eyes and expression. Their heart rate remained quick, but for now, it had stopped climbing.

As they stepped into sickbay, the Gliesian’s eyes widened at the sea of beds and the drone of the heart rate monitors. “Why are they all sleeping?” Now more than ever, the towering science officer sounded like a frightened child as they clung to the doctor.

“The crew of the starbase was very tired, so they’re resting here for now,” she lied, quickening their pace into her office before they had too much time to think about the scene before them. The door whished open and she led them through, sitting Koltak down in a chair nearby. “There. Can I get you something to drink or to eat?”

“Can I have water?” They sat with their hands folded in their lap and their feet tucked up under the seat of the chair as their eyes darted around the room, looking at the pictures on the wall. “Where are these from?” they asked, pointing to a pair of framed black and white portraits of the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower.

“These pictures are from Earth,” she explained, bringing her patient a glass of cold water, taking care to step around the shattered coffee cup on the floor behind her desk. “Paris, France, specifically. My home, though these images are from many years ago.” Clara handed them the glass. “Sip this slowly and tell me about your home, Koltak.”

“My home is very similar to Earth in many ways,” they explained as Clara began to gently clean the cut on their forehead. “The people aren’t unified, though. We still have ongoing wars between factions, but I’ve studied Earth history, and I believe that, when the wars are done, there will be peace, and we will be able to join the Federation and--”

A loud crash interrupted Koltak’s gentle reminiscence, making them jump and pull their legs to their chest. Clara muttered something in French under her breath before putting on a plastic smile and excusing herself from the room.

Out in the hallway, Ensign Dansville was pinned underneath an overturned gurney as an officer in a red uniform stood over him, heaving in labored breaths. The sound of her hurried footsteps and the opening door drew his attention. The tactical officer turned to regard her with a feral look in his eyes. His feet shifted, turning his shoulders to face her next. Clara felt her stomach drop and she slowly moved a hand to her combadge.

“Dupont to Security,” she said in a whisper, her throat constricted in fear. “Send someone to Primary Sickbay immediately. Several someones if you can. Quickly.”


	14. Chapter 14

Only hours later, the situation had only gotten worse. Raj stepped out of the turbolift and onto the bridge in a daze. Security was now patrolling the ship deck to deck as the outbreak spread, and all nonessential traffic was restricted. He nodded to the lieutenant on duty and motioned for him to stay in command as he continued toward the ready room.

Raj stepped wearily into the small office, seeking some small measure of solace in the gentle hum of the starship as his mind still raced with the implications of the mysterious illness that was sweeping through _Babel_. Over a hundred crew members had already been affected, with symptoms ranging from seeing shadows that weren't there all the way to the poor crewman who had been screaming for the last three hours, his mind, and apparently his nervous system convinced he was on fire. The engineering teams making repairs to the station were down to just over half of their original strength as the repair teams began to suffer the same effects, pushing Naazt's estimated time to completion dangerously close to the deadline imposed by the station's rapidly failing life support system. The only source of relief for Raj was that none of his senior staff had been affected.

Stopping at his desk, he ordered a coffee from the replicator, which materialized in front of him in a small brown cup. He drank slowly, shaking his head at the infernal machine's inability to properly recreate the effect of the caffeine he so desperately needed. He made a mental note to acquire a few bags of the Brazilian blend he'd favored in years past, for future occasions like this one. He sat down and began to review the most recent engineering report in detail when he felt the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end and felt what he could only think of as a presence in the room like he was being watched. He ignored it at first, but it only came back stronger, until he heard the gentle sound of someone shifting in one of the chairs he kept at the side of the room. Confusion turned to an icy chill as he recognized a middle-aged woman, someone who should not be there at all.

"Hello, Raj," the woman said. He could hear the bittersweet sadness in her voice as if she, too, understood the impossibility of her presence. She stood from the chair and let her long brown curls drape around her shoulders. She was beautiful, as always, and wearing the same floor-length sky blue gown that she had been wearing when he last saw her, two decades prior. Raj nearly jumped out of his chair to reach her but stopped himself short as he realized what must be happening.

"Rebecca, you can't be here," he finally managed. "You… you're dead. This isn't real."

"Why can't it be real, Raj?" she asked, gliding to meet him with a soft smile. She took his hand in hers and held it tight as she looked up into his eyes. Looking back into hers was like returning to a happier time, a time when he knew the galaxy was at his fingertips and everything would find a peaceful resolution. It was a time he had long since put behind him. Looking down at her now, he could see every line in her skin, every crease that time had left in its wake through the twenty-five years they had been together, exactly as he remembered her in his mind. He felt the warmth in her hands and smelled the sweet, floral scent of her perfume.

"Don't I look real to you?" she said. "Don't I _feel_ real? Stranger things have happened than two people who love each other getting a second chance."

He wanted it to be real, of course. For what seemed like an eternity, he willed it to be real, but looking around him at the ready room, he knew it couldn't be. After all, Rebecca's death was one of the main reasons he was on this ship in the first place.

"Rebecca, I watched you die," he said, shaking. "I held you in my arms and begged you not to go, and I would do anything in my power to bring you back again if I could, but I can't!"

"You could have saved me, you know," she said, letting his hand fall and stepping back. Her warm, compassionate face turned icy, and Raj could almost feel the heat leave the room. Rebecca -- he knew it wasn't her, but he didn't have anything else to call the vivid hallucination -- turned and removed an ornate Andorian _ushaan-tor_ blade from the collection of antique weapons on the wall.

"It was your pride, dear husband, that killed us. Don't you remember? First, the Cardassians killed our son, and then, when you pursued them, they took me from you as well." She stepped toward him, her hazel eyes filled with hate. "Was killing them worth it, Raj? Were the medals Starfleet gave you worth our lives? Did they comfort you at night after I was gone? Did they help you tell our daughter that her brother and mother wouldn't be coming back?"

Raj didn't know if it was guilt, disbelief, or a fundamental inability to oppose the woman he'd loved that kept him frozen in place. Desperately trying to shake what was happening, he tried reasoning with her. "Rebecca, you aren't real. None of this is. I won't try to stop you, and I won't fight you. This is all in my head, and nothing you say can hurt me any more than I've already hurt myself."

Pain seared through him as the blade cut across his ribs, and he let out an involuntary cry. The image of Rebecca in front of him landed another blow, and he dropped to a knee. "Please, stop this," he begged her as she drew line after line across his arms.

"This is what I felt as they killed me," she said, now towering over him, blood dripping from the sharp Andorian blade. "Before you die, I want you to know how much we suffered!"

"No!" he cried, praying for it to end. "You're not real, none of this is real!"

She plunged the blade deep into his stomach, and the pain overwhelmed him. His body felt numb, and he became distantly aware of his head hitting the floor. As his vision began to fade, he heard a voice calling from the doorway.

"Medical emergency! Doctor, it's the Captain. He's in the ready room, please send someone quick!"


	15. Chapter 15

“How much longer?” Commander O’Malley asked, clearly hoping for an improvement since the last estimate.

“Another six hours if nothing stops us,” David replied. He scanned the sensor readings again, mentally calculating course adjustments and accounting for subspace fluctuations that could hasten or hinder their return. Just as he was looking away, he caught a blip on the motion sensor. As soon as it appeared, it vanished again.

“That’s odd,” he wondered aloud.

“What’s odd?” Shannon asked, leaning over to peer at his screen.

David frowned. “The sensor grid picked up something behind us, just for a moment. There’s nothing there now, though.”

“Huh,” she said with a puzzled look and a shrug. “A piece of debris maybe?”

“Space debris? We’re moving at a hundred times the speed of light. It was brief, but it wasn’t _that_ brief. Whatever it was would have had to be moving alongside us.”

The woman threw up her hands expressively and leaned back in her seat. It was an unusually casual gesture, even for her. David could only assume that she was getting antsy. She’d been shifting around a lot in the past few hours like she couldn’t get comfortable. “Well, what could possibly be traveling with us like that? A sensor malfunction is just as likely as a piece of space debris.” Shannon folded her arms over her chest. “Are you sure nothing _is_ moving alongside us?”

“Pretty sure, Commander. Unless...” He did the math in his head, then throttled back momentarily, just long enough to drop behind something if it were still following at the same speed. Working at the deflector controls, he triggered a short tachyon burst. As the concentrated pulse of tachyon particles shot forward, the sensor panel showed a flare of energy, no more than two kilometers ahead of them. Before he had the chance to make sense of what he saw, a shimmer ahead of them quickly revealed a ship, roughly the size of a Federation Runabout. As the ship decloaked, the comms console began to blink.

“Uh, Commander? We’re being hailed.”

Shannon’s response was delayed as she processed what was going on. “O-open a channel,” she said hastily as she pulled her attention back to what was happening inside their shuttle.

“This is Lieutenant Commander Shannon O’Malley onboard the Federation Shuttle _Lee_. State your business.”

_“You will lower your shields, drop out of warp, and surrender your vessel and its cargo.”_

“I am under no obligation to do any such thing,” Shannon replied, her tone sharp. “We are well within Federation territory and any actions taken against this vessel will be considered an act of war against the Federation. I request again: State your business.”

 _“You were warned, Starfleet,_ ” the voice snarled. David had only a moment’s notice as the other vessel’s weapons charged. He brought the _Lee_ ’s nose down as an emerald beam of disruptor fire glanced off the shields at the top of the shuttle. 

“Commander, man the weapons!” he shouted, working furiously at the helm. At warp, there wasn’t much room for maneuvering, but he did his best to keep the shuttle away from the unknown craft’s facing weapons. 

A pair of phaser beams lashed out at their assailant as Shannon found the tactical controls. The first beam missed wide as the enemy vessel reoriented, but the second made a direct hit. It wasn’t enough to breach the shields, though, and as another disruptor beam battered his own limited defenses, David knew he needed the increased maneuverability that could only be achieved outside of a warp bubble. He dropped out of warp in the empty expanse of space between star systems, the distant star that was home to Starbase 214 only a dim light in the distance. The enemy vessel dropped out of warp a few dozen kilometers ahead of them, giving David time to prepare.

“Commander, I have a plan, but we’re only going to have one shot at it.”

“Well, let’s hear it,” Shannon said in a panic. “I’d really like for my career as a bridge officer to last more than a week.”

“Their disruptors fire every one-point-six seconds, and they seem to be locked in at that rate. Once they fire, I’ll shunt all power from the engines and the shields into the phasers. We’ll overload our weapon systems, but it should be enough to punch right through their shields. If you can hit the engines or their weapons, we should be able to get back to the starbase safely.”

“I’ll do my best,” Shannon replied uncertainly as she began aiming the shot.

David grimaced as he throttled forward. The shuttle barreled ahead as the enemy vessel charged its disruptors for a volley that would vaporize the shuttle and the two officers with it. He aimed high, then dipped down to race under the other ship as he felt the cabin shake. He triggered the energy transfer and winced at the sound of the shuttle’s phasers burning out with the intensity of their own beam. As the power flickered, the sensor readout went dark, leaving him with only the hope that they’d done any damage. A few moments passed, and then systems began to come back online. He turned the shuttle around to get a look at the other vessel and let out the breath he realized he’d been holding. The ship was still intact, but the engines were nothing but wreckage, and it was a simple matter to keep the _Lee_ away from its facing weapons.

“Nice shooting, Commander,” he said with a smile. “Now, should we get back to the starbase? Without phasers, I wouldn’t want to be anywhere close to here when their friends arrive.”

“Yes,” she said with an emphatic exhale. “Back to the starbase, warp whatever-will-get-us-there-soonest.” Shannon took a moment to breathe while David set them back on course to Starbase 214. After a few minutes of tense silence, she finally spoke up again. “That was some quick thinking, Ensign. You really know your stuff.”

“I told you I’m a pilot, didn’t I?” David smiled, and before he knew it, he was laughing. He laughed harder and harder until he could barely breathe. Before he knew it, Shannon was laughing alongside him, and the two continued for what felt like an eternity. When the laughter finally subsided, David wiped the tears from his eyes and smiled back at Shannon.

“Honestly, Commander, as terrifying as that was, and as _confusing_ as it was, it was the first time I’ve felt completely comfortable since we left Mars.”

“If life-threatening situations are what it takes to make you feel comfortable, David, I’m not sure you’re going to find much comfort onboard a science vessel,” the XO jeered. “In all honesty though, I understand what you mean. This is the first opportunity you’ve really had to be in your element and show your skills. I feel the same way any time I get to be around the ship’s science officers.”

“I guess we’d better hope everyone else onboard is feeling the same way right now. Hopefully, things haven’t gotten too bad back on _Babel_ while we’ve been gone.”


	16. Chapter 16

“Give them a dose of sedative and ease them onto the next stage,” Clara instructed an emergency recruit, her voice hollow and devoid of emotion. For hours she’d watched crew members come through the doors of sickbay in various states of delirium. Some were twitchy, others, violent. In the end, it was all the same. They’d devolve further and further into their madness before closing their eyes and falling into an increasingly-deep sleep.

At the insistence of her head of the emergency recruits, Ensign Byron Dansville, Clara had ordered scans of the crew for any non-biological chemical compounds in their bodies. Upon analyzing that data, she noticed a trend between affected crew members and levels of arsenic in their bloodstream. While the presence of high levels of the compound accounted for the patients’ paranoia and psychosis, it didn’t explain their loss of consciousness. She had tried treating a few of the patients with chelating agents, the standard antidote for arsenic poisoning, but they showed no response to the treatment. If the problem wasn’t being caused by the arsenic compound, they’d be back to square one, and Clara’s patients couldn’t afford for that to be the case. Something had to be interfering with the treatment of the arsenic poisoning, but without an isolated sample of the original toxin, there was no way of knowing what was causing that interference.

The hallway outside Secondary Sickbay was overflowing with gurneys now. Clara had to weave among them in order to get anywhere, averting her eyes from their unflinching features. She felt helpless, and it was not a feeling Clara was used to or comfortable with. Even though the people on the gurneys couldn’t see her as she passed, she couldn’t bring herself to look at their eyes. Instead, she kept her eyes on her PADD as she hustled back to her office in Primary Sickbay.

As the door to her office closed behind her, Clara sighed to herself, setting her PADD on her desk. “Coffee, black, fifty-four degrees,” she dictated to the replicator. Picking it up, Clara had a fleeting thought as she hoped this cup would fare better than her last one had. She paused as the cup reached her lips, waiting an anticipatory moment for any interruption before taking a sip and exhaling deeply. _I never thought I would miss my days on the psychiatric ward. Anything would be better than this silence._

Pushing the thought aside, Clara took a seat at her desk and began reviewing the tricorder scan data once again, hoping to find something she had missed the last three times she had looked over the scan results. Exhausted and reading carefully, she hadn’t made it more than a few pages into the results before her combadge chirped.

_“Doctor, we have cardiac variations in one of the starbase engineering crewmen, Primary Sickbay.”_

“I’m on my way,” she replied, standing up and abandoning her coffee once more. Out in the hospital room, it wasn’t difficult to find the patient in question. Several nurses were gathered around his bed. They parted as Clara approached.

“His heart rate started to slow shortly before I called you,” a young nurse informed the doctor before she had the opportunity to ask. “It’s been steadily becoming more erratic.”

“Have you tried defibrillation?”

“No, sir.”

Clara grimaced slightly. Being called “sir” was one aspect of military formality she suspected she would never quite warm up to. “Try it.”

The nurses cleared as one opened the patients’ shirt and applied a couple of small electrodes to the man’s chest. She pressed a button and his body seized as electricity surged through it. His heartbeat spiked momentarily before dropping back to its slow, irregular pattern. The nurse tried again with the same result.

“It’s as if his heart isn’t--”

The steady tone of a flatline filled the room and the medical staff fell silent. Clara stared at the biofunction monitor, marveling, mortified, at the unmoving readout. So, it can kill, she thought as the exhaustion that had settled into her body evaporated. “How long had he been unconscious?”

“We’re not certain. He was already in a vegetative state when he was brought aboard.”

She frowned. “Keep an eye on the others who came to us in that state and see if you can identify any warning signs that could indicate when they begin to take that downward turn.”

Clara had barely finished her thought when her combadge chirped again and a frantic voice called out to her. _"Medical emergency! Doctor, it's the Captain. He's in the ready room, please send someone quick!"_

Seasoned as she was, there was no stopping the sensation of a lead weight dropping through the bottom of her stomach as his words registered. Now was not the time to panic. “I’m on my way,” she responded before turning back to the nurses. “If you find anything, inform me. Otherwise, continue to document any changes in the patients.” As soon as they’d nodded in acknowledgment, she was out the door and hurrying to the nearest turbolift.

The moment the doors opened, Clara burst out and did everything she could to resist the urge to run across the bridge to the ready room door. It had been propped open and a security officer had his hands over the captain’s torso. There was blood everywhere, and a discarded blade lying on the ground several feet away. Her expression turned to stone as she entered the room and pushed the security officer aside.

“Someone tell me what happened here,” she demanded, opening her tricorder and scanning the captain’s body.

“We heard screaming from the ready room, and found him like this,” the man said. “He was mumbling something, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying.”

“What is that?” Clara asked, pointing to the blade on the ground.

“It’s Andorian, I think,” the security officer said. He nodded over to the display on the wall, where various ornate weapons of alien design were arranged. “He seems to have quite the collection.”

She looked around and briefly admired the weapons adorning the walls of the ready room. As her eyes returned to the captain on the ground, she tapped her combadge. “Sickbay, someone clear out the intensive care ward. I’m on my way with a patient.” She paused to reposition herself beside the captain. “Dupont to transporter room three, two to beam directly to sickbay.”


	17. Chapter 17

“It doesn’t make sense,” Clara said, pushing away her PADD displaying Raj’s medical data. “The self-inflicted wound must have come about as a result of the psychosis, but why has he been affected while we have not?”

“That’s not entirely the case,” Dansville corrected. “So far, we’ve had seven members of the medical staff show signs of early-stage disorientation, and three others have progressed on to the psychosis stage, so it is spreading.”

“Yes, but why haven’t you or I been affected yet? We have no idea how this compound is being transmitted, and the infection patterns have been anything but consistent.”

“Well, it’s probably airborne if it spread throughout the entire starbase within at most a couple of days. As for the transmission pattern, you said it presented like arsenic poisoning, right?”

“Not precisely, but the modified tricorders picked up elevated levels of arsenic in their blood, and the disorientation they experience is similar to what someone with acute arsenic poisoning might encounter.”

“Okay, so even if it isn’t _exactly_ arsenic poisoning, it’s probably similar enough that we can assume tolerance levels apply.”

Clara rubbed her temples, annoyed by her exhaustion. She should have been able to put those pieces together herself. Why hadn’t she? “That would account for the variability,” she admitted, picking up the PADD again. “I have noticed that the concentrations of arsenic, or whatever arsenic-like compound we’re dealing with, is present in high enough concentrations to cause acute toxicity.” She stared at the numbers on Raj’s chart and watched them flicker and change. _These numbers should be consistent._ Clara blinked, and the numbers stopped moving. “The captain’s levels match those of the other patients showing signs of disorientation, but when we conducted our scans earlier, they were within the normal range.”

“So _Babel_ is on a downhill slope at this point,” Byron concluded, sounding defeated.

“At least to some degree, it would seem so.” She looked back at the charts on the screen and grimaced. The meters and numbers had blurred together as if someone had run their fingers through a pattern in wet paint. She stared as they moved in unnatural ways, horrified and captivated as the reality of what was happening to her settled in.

“Sir?”

Clara snapped out of the trance and turned her scowl to the ensign. “Don’t ‘sir’ me. I can’t stand it.”

“Sorry, it just looked like-”

“Byron, get one of the enhanced tricorders.”

“Why?”

“Don’t question me when I ask you to do something during an emergency situation,” Clara barked with far more aggression than she’d shown before.

Ensign Dansville recoiled. “Okay, okay, I’ll be right back.”

As he ran out of the room, Clara leaned back in her chair and closed her eyes, rubbing the outside corners of her eyebrows as she muttered to herself. “I can’t afford to fall victim to whatever this plague is. It’s my job to find solutions, not become part of the problem.” She leaned forward and pounded her fist against the desk. “No, I won’t let it happen. I’ll have Byron monitor my vitals, but I will not give in to whatever this is.”

The young ensign rushed back into the room, holding out a tricorder to the doctor. “Here,” he said urgently.

“No, scan me,” she said, standing up. “I need you to keep a close watch on my readout, and if anything happens,” she paused as the picture of the Eiffel Tower on the wall seemed to bend and swirl. “If I become unable to complete the antidote, the duty will fall to you. Do you understand me, Ensign?”

His mouth opened and closed again as he withheld further commentary. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Good, now get me hooked up. We have much work to do and precious little time to do it in.”


	18. Chapter 18

Jessica woke with a start at the sound of the communicator chirp. “Barnes here,” she said hastily as she rolled out of bed and started to don her black and gold uniform. 

_“Lieutenant, you’re needed on the bridge,”_ came the reply. _“The Captain is in Sickbay, and Commander O’Malley still hasn’t returned.”_

“Acknowledged,” she managed weakly. _That means I’m in command,_ she realized. “I’m on my way. I’ll want a full report as soon as I reach the bridge.”

Now dressed, she pulled her hair back into a loose ponytail and left her quarters at the fastest walking pace she could manage, determined to look confident and in control of herself. With the high rate of casualties so far, the normally bustling hallways of _Babel_ looked decidedly barren, and the silence was deafening as she made her way to the turbolift.

“Deck One,” she said as the doors closed behind her. The turbolift began to move, and Jessica slumped back against the wall. _You wanted a command role,_ she thought to herself. _Here’s your opportunity to show you deserve it. Don’t back down just because you don’t like the circumstances._ As the turbolift slowed, she gathered herself and took three deep breaths, in and out, in and out, in and out, just like she did before training. She clasped her hands behind her back to keep from fidgeting and stepped calmly onto the bridge as the doors opened. She made her way to the captain’s chair and stared at it like a wild targ ready to strike. 

“Miss Benson, what’s our current status?” she said to the young woman at the science station before carefully sitting down in the center seat. As she looked forward at the viewscreen, the dark and crippled station seemed to emit an aura of sickness and disease that made her want to look away.

“All ship functions are within normal parameters, sir,” Renetta began. “There are currently 537 patients in Sickbay, 289 of them are _Babel_ crew. Starbase 214’s sickbays are running at full capacity, and there are 106 individuals unaccounted for on the station. We’ve been in constant communication with our engineering team onboard the starbase, and their work is progressing slowly but steadily. Their last estimated time to completion was around sixteen hours, and that was three hours ago. Reports from the medical staff have yet to confirm the exact cause of the problem, but they’re working on gathering more information. Doctor Dupont believes it might be a variation of some sort of arsenic poisoning, but she says that until she has the sample from Commander O’Malley and Ensign Brahms, she won’t be able to make much more progress.” The young science officer paused just long enough to take a breath before continuing. “Finally, the commander should be due back in just a few hours if they have adhered to their projected itinerary.”

“Thank you, Ensign. All things considered, that’s about the best we could have hoped for. What about the Captain? Is he stable?”

“From what I heard, he was as stable as can be expected given the circumstances. He took a blade to the torso, and the wound was fairly deep. He’s unconscious, as far as I know, but the internal bleeding has been stopped and the wound repaired to the best of our ability.”

“That’s good. Given the nature of his incident, from now on I don’t want anyone alone onboard until we’ve solved this crisis. If anyone starts seeing things or notices odd behavior in another crew member, I want it reported. We can use force fields to isolate any crew member who becomes violent, or sedate anyone at risk of self-harm.” She turned to the young man currently manning the Ops station. “Hail the starbase, I want to check in on Naazt.”

After a few minutes of waiting, the Tellarite engineer appeared on the screen, his uniform stained with dirt and blood. “You wanted to see me, Lieutenant?”

“I wanted to check in. Things have gotten worse over here, and our medical staff is at their breaking point. I don’t want to interrupt your work, but I need to know if you’ve seen the same level of degradation that we have and if you need any more resources in order to meet your deadline.”

The Tellarite nodded. “It’s been bad over here as well. One of my engineers was working on installing a power conduit one second, then attacking me with a spanner the next. I’ve diverted a team to identifying which systems we can safely ignore so that we’ll be able to reinstall the coils without blowing any critical systems. At this rate, it’s the only way to save the station before more people die. As for resources, there’s nothing left on _Babel_ for you to give other than a cure for whatever this nonsense is. If we don’t get one in the next few hours, there might not be anyone left here to save.”

“Understood, Chief. I’ll do everything I can, but right now it seems our lives are in the hands of the commander and Ensign Brahms.”


	19. Chapter 19

They were finally within impulse range of _Babel_ , and Shannon wanted nothing more than to be back on the ship, mostly to stretch her legs. Twenty hours in a shuttle was enough to make almost anyone stir-crazy, and with an unexpected confrontation thrown in, Shannon was anxious to get back on a vessel with decent shields and firepower.

“We should be within hailing range by now, Commander,” David offered. “Should I open a channel?”

“Please do,” Shannon said, stretching her legs from where she sat and shifting her back into a more comfortable position. When Ensign Brahms nodded, she spoke. “ _Babel_ , this is Lieutenant Commander O’Malley. What’s your status?”

 _Babel_ ’s bridge appeared on the viewscreen, and Shannon was surprised to see Lieutenant Barnes, not the captain, answering her. 

“Commander, it’s good to see you again. We’re in pretty bad shape over here. I trust you have good news for us?”

“We have another container of coils from the same shipment contained in an isolated chamber onboard the shuttle,” she reported back. “Where is Captain Murali?”

“The captain is in Sickbay right now, in the doctor’s care. I’ve been in command for the last four hours. I’ll inform the medical staff that you’re ready to beam the sample aboard, and then I’ll bring you up to date once you’re back.”

“Please do. Have the sample transported to the biohazard isolation unit. O’Malley out.”

The screen on the shuttle’s dash blinked back to the Federation insignia, and Shannon sank into her chair with an exasperated sigh, stretching her aching legs yet again. “If the captain is in sickbay, I’m afraid to know what other surprises await us onboard the ship,” she said to David.

“Maybe he’s just late for his physical?” David said with a shrug.

Shannon snorted at his optimism. “If only. Given what we left behind, I have a feeling the news Lieutenant Barnes has for us isn’t going to be so benign.” A tense silence settled in as Ensign Brahms navigated the _Lee_ toward the shuttle bay. “I can’t wait for this shift to end,” she muttered as he eased the craft into the hangar.

The two disembarked and headed for the turbolift. Shannon tapped her communicator and contacted Lieutenant Barnes on the bridge. “We’re back aboard the ship, Lieutenant, en route to the bridge.”

 _“I’ll be in the ready room,”_ Jessica replied, though there was something odd about the way she said it that Shannon couldn’t understand.

“We’re on our way.” The conversation ended as the two stepped into the turbolift, the doors closing behind them. “Deck One,” she ordered before turning to look at David. “Something feels off. I can’t tell what, but something is definitely not right here.”

“I agree,” he said. “The whole ship seems quiet.”

The feeling had settled in to stay by the time the turbolift reached the bridge and Shannon and David stepped out. A few of the crew members turned to see who had arrived, and Shannon noticed their shoulders relax just a bit. The knot in her stomach tightened as she nodded to them in passing and approached the ready room.

As the doors parted, Shannon gasped. Jessica sat behind the captain’s desk, looking rather uncomfortable. The carpet in the middle of the room was covered in what Shannon could only assume was an incredible amount of dried blood. As her eyes took in the morbid scene before her, she noticed the weapon that had likely been the cause of the stains, a bloody _ushaan-tor_ resting on the small table in front of the couch along the wall. The knot in her stomach pulsed and rolled, encouraging her gag reflex. She did her best to fight the urge to vomit at the sight and walked inside.

Jessica stood and moved to meet Shannon and David beside the captain’s desk. Shannon angled her body so she didn’t have to see the stained carpet and held out a hand to her Chief of Security. “Lieutenant, I relieve you,” she said briskly, though her tone was not unfriendly.

“Thank God” was all the woman had to say as she took Shannon’s hand firmly. “You wouldn’t believe the day we’ve had.”

“I’m sure I wouldn’t,” Shannon said, the nausea gradually calming. “What the hell happened here, Lieutenant?”

“When we first encountered the crew of the starbase, we determined that they were suffering from some sort of medical condition, but we believed that whatever had infected them couldn’t spread to our own crew. We were wrong. The infection seems to be chemical in nature and causes delirium in the infected person. Some people see shadows, others attack their friends. Some,” she said, gesturing at the bloody blade on the table and the dried blood on the ready room carpet, “harm themselves.” 

Shannon swore under her breath. “What’s the status of the starbase repairs?”

“Moving along slowly. With more and more casualties, Naazt is now prioritizing locking down the critical systems so that when we restart the fusion reactors we don’t damage anything that can’t be fixed. Getting the coils installed won’t take more than a couple of hours, but if we did it now, we could permanently damage anything from artificial gravity to life support.”

“Alright, going slightly different than planned, but moving along. What’s _Babel_ ’s status?”

“We have almost half of our crew suffering from the infection. Most are comatose or sedated by the medical staff. We’re stretched dangerously thin, but we haven’t lost any of our crew. I wish I could say the same about the starbase.”

“How many casualties have there been?”

Jessica looked down at a PADD to review the most recent report. “Forty-seven dead, with another dozen close to it. Let’s just hope the doctor can put together a cure soon. Now, tell me about your trip. Were you able to discuss the situation with the Brevhal?”

“To be honest, there wasn’t much to discuss,” Shannon began. “They had received the shipment from another trade vessel owned and operated by an alien race called the Strux. The two ships met in the middle, made an exchange, and then the Brevhal carried the cargo back to the starbase. All of our interactions with them were pleasant and benign, but our trip back was far more eventful. We were ambushed by an unknown vessel, though I strongly believe the Brevhal knew nothing of it. If it wasn’t for Ensign Brahms’ quick thinking, we might not be here right now.”

“Well, I’m glad to see you both safe and sound. I think that covers everything, Commander. The ship is yours, and I’ll go where you need me.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant. If you could head over to the starbase and assist Naazt, I think that would be the best task for the time being. If something comes up and we need you back on the ship, I’ll let you know.” 

Jessica nodded and exited the room, leaving David and Shannon alone with the spilled blood of their captain. She looked to the ensign wearily. “I don’t know about you, but I don’t particularly want to stay here. Let’s get back on the bridge.” He nodded and they turned to leave the room, both pointedly looking away from the stain on the carpet. _Things don’t look good, but at least my Chief of Security seems to be more comfortable around me. That’s one positive outcome from this nightmare, I suppose. Until we get the starbase back up and running and an antidote for this plague, it’ll take more than a pleasant interaction to make me feel at ease._ Shannon stared for a moment at the captain’s chair. She was only just getting comfortable with the station of First Officer and sitting in that chair on her shift but knowing that she’d be sitting in it now as the acting captain made her incredibly uncomfortable. _Just don’t die on me, Old Man,_ she thought as she took her seat. _I’m not about to let you leave me stranded in this position just yet._


	20. Chapter 20

Jessica shook off the nausea that always followed her through a transporter beam and led her security team through the corridors toward Starbase 214’s Main Engineering section. Comatose crew members were tucked away neatly in rows at the sides of the hallways. _I guess that’s the best the engineers here could do given the circumstances,_ she thought absently, trying not to focus too much on the eerie scene around her. 

She walked through the open door and into a large, circular space in the very center of the station. The emergency lighting was still on here, indicating the importance of the work being done. As she made her way toward the center of activity, she took note of her labored breathing and the staleness of the air around her. _We’re running out of time_. Up ahead, she found Naazt arguing with an Andorian woman about something she didn’t understand. 

“No!” the Tellarite shouted, gesturing wildly with a piece of equipment in his hand. “ _This_ one goes here, _that_ one goes there. Right?”

“Yes sir, sorry sir,” the woman replied, taking the equipment and scurrying off to complete her repairs.

“Am I interrupting?” Jessica asked as she approached the scene. Naazt sighed and set down his tools. 

“No, Lieutenant, I was just taking a break to educate today’s ignorant youth. Some of them couldn’t tell a spanner from a tricorder if their life depended on it!” He let out an amused snort from his large pig-like snout and stomped a hoof on the floor.

“I’m sure they’re just as tired and stressed as the rest of us, Chief,” Jessica replied.

“Nonsense. Engineers don’t get the luxury of being tired in a crisis. We work until the job is done, and we rest afterward. I would have thought you of all people would appreciate the importance of putting duty before leisure, Lieutenant.”

Shaking off Naazt’s typical Tellarite disposition, she redirected the conversation to the task at hand. “I’ve brought you some more manpower, Chief. We’re security, not engineers, but I think you’ll find we can take directions and do routine maintenance as well as any officer.”

“I’ll take any hands I can get, Lieutenant. Pick up that toolkit over there and follow me.” He gestured over to the Andorian woman. “Send your other men to Thriss over there. She’ll get them where they need to be. A remarkable eye for assessing needs and resource allocation, she has. She’ll make a fine engineer yet if I can break her of all of Starfleet’s habits first.”

They walked over to the tertiary fusion reactor and Jessica watched as Naazt began to remove an access panel. He set the panel down gently, with a level of care she would not have expected from someone of his demeanor. He took out a tricorder and began scanning for something she couldn’t make out, and probably wouldn’t understand anyway.

“Chief, can I ask you a question?” she said hesitantly.

“You can always ask me a question, Lieutenant. Whether or not I answer will depend on what it is.”

“You speak rather disparagingly of Starfleet and its methods. If that’s how you feel, why are you here?”

Naazt didn’t answer for a few minutes, and Jessica started to think her question had fallen into the “won’t answer it” category, when he finally spoke.

“I don’t dislike Starfleet, Lieutenant. In fact, I find it to be one of the most rewarding organizations I have ever been a part of. What I disagree with is the way the Academy teaches our new engineers.” Finished with the work he’d been doing, he moved over to the next panel. “Put that panel back on, would you?”

She knelt down and started to put the panel back in place, thinking on what he’d just said. “You don’t think the curriculum is rigorous enough?”

“Oh, it’s fine, perfectly textbook. I’m sure any graduate could tell me how to generate a warp field, or what rate of fuel injection is optimal for traveling from Earth to Vulcan, or some other inane theoretical milk run. They don’t teach ingenuity, though, and they don’t force the cadets to get their hands dirty. Did you know, of my entire staff, only three of them had ever changed a fusion coil by hand?”

“I take it that’s not many?”

“Not many?” he snorted. “It’s just dismal. No one teaches real, hands-on work anymore. Did you know that on my first assignment, my commanding officer took all of his new graduates and made us build a combustion engine in the holodeck?”

“A combustion engine? Those are ancient! Why would you ever need to use one?”

“We didn’t, of course, and most of us didn’t know how either. But, as Commander Rathdrum pointed out, we knew everything we needed to figure out how to build one. It took us weeks in our off-duty time, but each and every one of us got it working in the end. He wanted us to learn to get our hands dirty and figure out how to create something we hadn’t memorized from some Academy textbook. That’s the kind of thinking we need our engineers to be able to use in a crisis, and half of my team just doesn’t have it yet.”

They moved on to panel after panel, working tirelessly against the racing clock. Just over an hour after they started on the panels, Naazt had to disable the environmental alarms, and the engineering teams were now breathing heavily through oxygen masks as they finished their work.

“Chief, we need to finish soon,” Jessica said. “There are thousands of unconscious crew on this station that don’t have the masks we’re wearing. We’ve done everything we can.”

Naazt nodded and hit his combadge. “Naazt to engineering teams, stand down from your work, and lock everything down. We’re starting the generators in five minutes.”

As the team gathered by the control station, Jessica could feel the tension suffocating her. Not every relay and conduit was safely repaired, and starting up the reactors like this was likely to damage the station. The alternative, though, was that over two thousand people would die. Naazt worked at the controls and the first reactor started up with a groan. As the second and third reactors joined it, the groan evened out into a steady hum. 

“Well, we have power,” said the Andorian, Thriss. “Damage report coming in now. Power surge in section thirty-six has taken the holodecks offline, still no lighting in the lower levels, and we have electrical fires in Secondary Ops.” She paused, checking the readings, and the entire team seemed frozen in anticipation. Finally, she looked back up at Naazt. “No further damage. Life support is online.” The tension in the airlifted as the team let out a sigh of relief.


	21. Chapter 21

A low hum filled the biohazard isolation unit as the scanners surveyed the surface of the shipping container. The doctor and Ensign Dansville watched as the results streamed onto the readout, turning up nothing out of the ordinary. Clara frowned and blinked away a distortion as the readout in front of her seemed to melt off of the desk.

“Byron, open the crate, please.”

The young ensign, wearing a hazard suit, walked over to the isolation unit’s airlock-style doors and entered the room, carrying a tricorder and a series of other small scanners. Once the doors sealed behind him, he proceeded to the crate in the center of the unit and opened it. A fine powder exploded into the air as if the inside of the container had been pressurized. He coughed instinctively. Clara initiated another scan within the chamber as the ensign began scanning with the medical and standard-issue tricorders simultaneously. The data streamed to the readout on the exterior of the unit.

“We have the arsenic compound,” she said, blinking hard once again.

“What is it?”

Clara shook her head. “The exact chemical does not appear to be in the tricorder database, but it looks like a form of hybrid amphetamine, entirely artificial.”

“An amphetamine?” Dansville asked, closing the tricorders. “Why lace the shipment with a stimulant?”

“Because,” the doctor looked up from the screen, pausing to shake away phantoms once more. “When you pair a highly-active stimulant with a neurotoxin, you create a powerful drug that causes extreme disorientation whose onset is so rapid for most, they become incapacitated before they can do anything to defend against it. The amphetamine component of this drug likely uses the increased gamma-aminobutyric acid production as a vehicle for the arsenic, binding it to active neural junctions and blocking synaptic function.” Clara jumped back, startled by the appearance of a vaguely humanoid shape beside her that she knew must have been invisible to the ensign in the isolation unit. She took a moment to catch her breath before continuing, her voice sounding strained as she continued to stare at the apparition. “The arsenic’s effect on the brain causes delirium and hallucinations on its own, but as other neural functions become impaired, the body enters a state of panic. Adrenaline production increases as the person begins to notice something is wrong. They become twitchy, anxious, and further confused as their mind becomes clouded and--”

Clara grabbed a sample container from off the table and walked through the now half-formed human that stood slack-jawed and deformed in front of her, resisting the urge to flinch as she passed through the air in its place that she swore was denser than the air in the rest of the room. She dropped the vial into a receiving slot on the side of the isolation unit. “Gather a sample and get out of there. We don’t have much time and I need you on this side of the glass.” She slid the latch shut and turned to walk away. “Meet me in the lab.”

“Doctor,” the ensign interjected sharply, stopping Clara in her tracks. “We were given explicit orders not to travel alone.” He took the vial and swept a small pile of powder into the container before sealing it and venturing back to the airlock to run a decontamination cycle. “With all due respect, given your current state, I think it would be extremely unwise for you to be left unattended.”

The older woman scowled. “That’s rather impertinent of you,” she began. As she turned to look over her shoulder, the deformed figure with its limbs and jaw hanging at incongruent angles stared back at her with empty eyes. She shivered. Bruises began to form on its mangled body, seeping into the flesh like spilled ink. Clara turned away quickly. “But you may be right. Just don’t dawdle.”


	22. Chapter 22

Clara watched distractedly as Ensign Dansville placed the sample from the shipment into an analysis chamber and slid the hatch shut. As he walked back toward the readout at the desk, he turned and met the doctor’s unfocused eyes.

“You really should sit down or something,” he insisted for the third time.

She scowled. “Just let me know when the analysis is ready, Byron.”

A few moments later, he beckoned for her. “Alright, chemical analysis is complete. It looks like we have something called methylphenarsenate. It’s a tailor-made drug that is in the Federation’s systems, but it’s not programmed into the tricorders. Looks like it’s illegal.”

“I can only imagine why,” Clara said flatly, pushing the ensign aside. The chemical diagram swam on the screen in front of her. No amount of blinking cleared the image or the words below it. Agitated, she resigned herself to a chair beside the desk, falling to the floor as she tried to sit in it.

“Here,” Byron said as he hurried across the room and dragged what Clara could only assume was a real chair over to where she was still sitting on the ground. She stood up with a huff and sat herself down carefully in the seat.

“Computer, access any known accounts of methylphenarsenate poisoning.”

There was a dissenting chirp followed by a woman’s voice. _“There are no recorded cases of methylphenarsenate poisoning on record.”_

“Okay, then simulate the effects of methylphenarsenate on the human brain.”

 _“Processing.”_ There was a pause. _“Simulation complete.”_

“Good. Computer, compile all recent neurocortical monitor logs and tricorder scans, and compare them to the simulation.”

There was a chirp, followed by the patient voice again: _“Processing.”_

“I didn’t know it could do all that,” Byron said in awe.

“Theoretically, it can do just about anything a holodeck can as long as you don’t need to see or interact with anything to get your answers.” Clara’s gaze was fixed straight ahead. There was a shadow in her peripheral vision that felt familiar, but which she had no desire to confirm the existence of.

_“Simulation complete. Results match.”_

“Alright, but I thought we already knew that,” Ensign Dansville hiccupped in amazement. Clara shushed him.

“Computer, simulate chelation therapy standard for arsenic poisoning on the hypothetical brain analog.” The shadow in her periphery stepped into the room. Its movements were jerky and inhuman. She ignored it and waited for the response.

_“Chelation therapy failed.”_

“Why?” Clara demanded, turning slightly in her chair to avoid looking at the shambling figure.

_“Chelating agent ineffective. Could not neutralize arsenic compound.”_

Clara turned back to Byron, who was leaning against the desk, staring at the ceiling absentmindedly. “Have you been paying attention?”

He turned to face her. “Yeah, why?”

She let out a loud huff. “Look at the chemical structure of the compound and compare it to arsenic, then see how the chelating agent binds.”

The young medical officer was quiet for several minutes while he focused on the computer screen. Meanwhile, the shadow on the far end of the room drew nearer and nearer. _It’s not real. You know it’s a hallucination, and it cannot hurt you._ Clara looked at it and immediately wished she hadn’t. Its eyes were sunken and bloodshot and its skin was covered in angry red gashes and deep purple bruises. One arm hung limply, dislocated from its socket and long, deep gashes ran down the length of their forearm. The other arm’s radius jutted out at an odd angle, barely contained by the tightly-stretched skin over the broken bone. Several fingers on that same hand were bent unnaturally, snapped in several places. The figure’s torso was uncovered, and several of its ribs were obviously broken. A large slice like a canyon ran straight through its side, and its viscera were threatening to burst out with each step it took. It limped along on broken ankles, knocking at the knees, which were marred and swollen, and stumbling as its feet rolled underneath it, held together only by connective tissue. The doctor drew her petrified gaze back up to the figure’s face and saw what had only begun to materialize before. It was a woman’s face. Those sunken, bloodshot eyes held no life. Her jaw was slack, broken on impact by the vehicle that had hit her after it had sent a metal sign tearing through her body. Clara had been in her thirties and working on a trauma ward when she had last seen the woman. She was the first patient to have died in her care.

“Hey, _Hey!_ ” Ensign Dansville had Clara by the shoulder and was shaking her. She hadn’t noticed. “Are you okay?” he asked once she had turned to look at him.

“Fine,” she responded, her voice sounding much smaller than she had expected. Clara stole a glance back toward the far end of the room, but the figure was gone. She relaxed a little. “What did you find?”

“The methylphenarsenate appears to contain the arsenic within the molecular structure, making it impossible for the chelating agent to bind like it normally would.”

“What if we dismantle the molecule with nanites before having them administer the chelating agent?” She paused and narrowed her eyes, pensively. “Computer, calculate the probability of a successful cure if nanites are used to target the methylphenarsenate, break apart the molecule, and administer a chelating agent.”

_“There is an eighty-two percent chance of success in early vegetative-state patients.”_

“That must be the average it’s using. Computer, what is the projected success rate in pre-vegetative patients?”

_“There is a ninety-seven percent chance of success in pre-vegetative state patients.”_

“What about in comatose patients?”

_“There is a thirty-four percent chance of success in comatose patients.”_

“ _Merde_ ,” Clara swore. “Those aren’t the odds I wanted to hear, but it’s better than nothing.”

Ensign Dansville shook his head. “Even if it does work, I don’t know how to do that.”

Clara frowned. She was about to chastise him for not knowing something so basic when his face began to twist into a tormented scream. No sound came out, but she recognized the face instantly.

“Hey!” the ensign snapped, clapping his hands in front of her face. “Focus. You need to tell me how to do this or you’re going to end up in the same boat as everyone else on this ship.”

The distortion vanished when his hands interrupted her field of vision. _No staring._ Clara closed her eyes and leaned back in the chair. “Nanites are simple enough to program. I assume you know the basics?”

“Well, yeah, I’ve just never had to do it before.”

“You’re going to have to do it now, so get ready and let me walk you through the steps. We don’t have much time.”

When the shapes in the darkness behind her eyelids grew too much to bear, she opened her eyes and kept them moving around the room, lingering on no single spot for more than three seconds. Command by command, she spent the next ten minutes feeding lines of code to her vicarious eyes and hands as her vision grew more and more distorted. When they had finished, Clara gave the command for the computer to execute the new program.

“So, that’s it,” Byron said with a note of hesitation as the ship’s ventilation system kicked into overdrive.

“We’ve done what we can. Have the program sent to the starbase and have them run it immediately.” Her eyelids felt heavy, with weight being added with each subsequent blink. The PADD on the table next to the ensign began to sound alarms.

“Doctor. Doctor! Doctor Dupont!”

And the world went black.


	23. Chapter 23

_Captain’s Log, Stardate 48550.2: In the day since Doctor Dupont’s successful deployment of the antidote to what is now being referred to as the Strux Infection, both_ Babel _and the starbase are slowly recovering. The damage to the station was minimal, but the psychological toll on its crew, as well as my own crew, will take time to heal. Remarkably, the number of deaths was low, and none of my crew perished from their injuries. My wounds were among the most severe, and plenty of my staff believe I should take a few more days’ rest before returning to duty. I personally believe they are underestimating my recovery._

_After reviewing the data from my First Officer's mission and consulting with the Brevhal, who have been forthcoming and apologetic regarding their accidental involvement in the crisis, we have determined that the shuttle's attacker was indeed a vessel belonging to a race of beings known as the Strux. There has been no recorded contact between them and the Federation, which leaves us with a mystery to solve. Why would the Strux arrange for a Federation starbase to be infected with an engineered chemical agent whose only purpose seems to be inflicting psychological and physical harm? Why did they go to such lengths to cover up their involvement? There’s a deeper connection here than some random act of violence, and I intend to find out what it is._

_I've ordered the ship to proceed at a heading that will take us toward Strux space, but our mission of peaceful exploration will continue. My science teams have located a particularly interesting nebula, and I've approved a three-day observation to collect data and run experiments. Hopefully, this mission will be a boost to morale and confidence after a crisis that has everyone understandably shaken. Still, the events of the past few days have done more to bolster my confidence in this ship and her crew. I've put in a commendation for Doctor Dupont for her extraordinary medical skill and leadership, and I've reviewed and approved a similar commendation submitted by Commander O'Malley for Ensign David Brahms, our helmsman, for his quick thinking and bravery during the Strux attack. Overall, our ragtag group of misfits has taken the first step toward proving Starfleet wrong on this mission, and I expect it will be the first of many._

Raj ended the recording just in time for the door chime to sound in his ready room. He turned off the display on his desk and sat up straight, shaking off the weariness that came with his quick recovery.

“Come,” he said sternly and was not surprised to see his second officer enter the room and take a seat across from him, taking care to step around the bloodstains on the carpet Raj hadn’t had time to have removed. 

“You asked to see me, sir?” Jessica asked.

“I did,” he replied, “but before you give me your report, I wanted to ask your opinion on what happened over the last few days.”

“My opinion, sir?” His security chief wrung her hands anxiously.

“Speak freely, Lieutenant,” Raj said. “From your perspective, how did the crew perform?”

“I think they all performed admirably, sir. We got the job done and saved almost everyone. The losses on the starbase were inevitable, and we did everything we could have possibly done.” She hesitated, and Raj thought for a moment she was going to stop there. Instead, she let out a breath and looked him in the eyes.

“With all due respect, Captain, isn’t this a line of inquiry better suited for your First Officer?”

Raj didn’t reply for a long time. Instead, he frowned at the photo on his desk. In the picture in the frame, Rebecca was smiling, as she always was. In his mind, though, he couldn’t shake the image of her driving a blade into his stomach, seething with hatred for him for the actions that led to her death and the death of their son. They were all so happy in that picture, though. Raj, Rebecca, and the children, all smiling at the old-fashioned Earth camera that Captain Patterson was so fond of. _Admiral Patterson, now_ , Raj reminded himself and felt the sobering chill of reality come back to him. _What is your game this time, Eli?_

“Yes, Miss Barnes, and I will ask for her input as well, but you know very well why I asked for your input. This is your investigation, after all. I can’t trust O’Malley until I know why she’s here. We know that someone onboard is working to sabotage this mission, and the members of the senior staff are the ones with the most opportunity to do so. Until we find and stop that person, everyone is a suspect. You’re the only one I can trust completely.”

“I’ll do my best, sir. Whatever their plan is, though, I don’t think this mission was related.”

Raj turned his desk display back on and pulled up the data they had on their Strux attacker. “On the contrary, Lieutenant, I think this encounter has been planned for quite some time.”


	24. Chapter 24

As soon as her shift had ended and she had been relieved from duty, Renetta walked as quickly as was appropriate to the turbolift and headed for her quarters on Deck Two. This time, there would be nothing to interrupt them. David had mentioned that he’d been granted time where he was not to be disturbed unless there was an emergency. He’d seemed genuinely sorry that their lunch encounter had been cut short previously, and Renetta had been a bit taken aback by his resolve to make things right. _It seems like he’s really gone out of his way to make sure things go smoothly this time. He even called it a date, and he sounded like he meant it._

Renetta walked into her room and started to get ready, letting her mind wander a little more freely this time, knowing there was at least some level of mutual interest involved beyond friendship.

 _I mean,_ she thought to herself as the music began to play, _there’s no sense getting too excited about it. We haven’t even had the first date yet, so there’s no saying it’ll really go anywhere, but still… This is the first time anyone’s asked me on a date since the Academy, and even that felt a lot less formal than this does. I mean, it’s still Ten Forward, but we’ve moved from lunch to dinner. That seems like something. Is it something? Maybe I’m overthinking this. I probably am._ Her mind paused for a split second. _So, do I wear something nicer than last time? Probably not. I don’t want to show up and be way overdressed. I don’t even know if I own anything that would count as being overdressed_.

The young ensign checked the time. She still had nearly three hours before their date even started. _I suppose there’s no sense in getting ready this far ahead of time._ Renetta walked over to her dresser and took out a bulky sweater and pants. _Maybe taking a few laps will help. I just hope there’s a holodeck available._

She piled on the heavy winter clothes, slid on a pair of long socks, and grabbed her old hockey skates from where they sat beside her bed and slung them over her shoulders by their knotted laces. On her way out the door, Renetta picked up her stick and headed for the nearest holodeck.

By some small stroke of luck, nobody else had taken advantage of the post-chaos calm to relax on the holodeck. Renetta sighed gratefully as she activated program Benson 3 and stepped into the room.

The interior of the ship gave way to a chilly alpine lake, frozen completely and surrounded by the thick midwinter snow that brought back so many memories of home. She took a deep breath and felt an overwhelming sense of joy. The sharp smells of pine and cedar mingled with the sweet smell of wood fires, and suddenly, she couldn’t get out onto the lake fast enough. She ran, her boots crunching through the fresh powder with each step, to the little lean-to by the shore. Taking a seat on the bench, she hastily removed her shoes and put on her skates, her hot breath sending up clouds of vapor into the still mountain air. As soon as her laces were bound, she grabbed up her stick and raced for the water’s edge, pushing out onto the smooth ice. She let herself glide for a while, enjoying the rush of cold air against her cheeks. Her heart raced, and before long, she was sprinting for the far shore, dodging and turning around invisible obstacles. She made a circuit around the near quarter of the massive lake before she came to a halt a little ways away from the shore. The scraping sound of her blades against the ice as they ground her to a stop echoed for what felt like an eternity. Renetta smiled, puffing out clouds of steam as she caught her breath.

She lifted her stick and tapped it hard against the ice two times. A goal and a stack of pucks materialized. Renetta took the top puck and set it down on the ice in front of her. She knocked it back and forth, catching it on the blade of her stick, testing the weight of it against her grip. Pushing off, she carried the rubber cylinder forward, still playing a game of catch with herself as she moved. Nearing the goal, she wound up and took a shot, missing wide to the left. She cursed under her breath as she turned sharply back to the pile of pucks across the ice and lined up to try again. After several minutes, she had gotten right back to where she remembered leaving off when she last stepped off the ice. That feeling of control and satisfaction that came with being wholly in her element embraced her, and she found herself able to forget about _Babel_ and the infection and everything that had happened over the past few days.

Renetta maintained the hypnotic rhythm of fetching, carrying, and shooting pucks for long enough that the sun had begun to graze the mountain peaks. The temperature began to drop as the shadows grew around her, and as she found herself wiping her nose more and more often, she looked up. _Oh no_.

“Computer, what time is it?” She asked in a panic, as she raced for the shore.

_It is currently sixteen hundred hours and thirty minutes._

“Oh no no no no…” Renetta scrambled to untie her laces, throwing her skates down in the snow as she shoved her feet into her untied boots before gathering everything up and running for the door. “Computer, end simulation!” she shouted as she burst through the doors and took off sprinting down the corridor, trailing snowy footprints and nearly bowling over three other crew members as she made her way back to her quarters.

By the time she skidded into her room, the simulated snow had completely dissipated and dried. She dropped her stick and skates by the door and left a trail of winter clothing on the floor as she hopped and stumbled to the shower. In record time, she had herself cleaned up and dressed in a loose red tunic-style sweater and pants. She hopped out the door and into the hallway, still pulling on her second shoe. The next time Renetta was aware of her body was when she took a deep breath in the turbolift down to Deck Ten. The doors opened at exactly seventeen-hundred hours. She took another deep breath and smoothed her hair, which had started to frizz during her mad scramble to get to her date on time. As she stepped into the lounge, she saw David sitting at the same table they’d had last time.

 _Well, here we go_ , Renetta thought with anticipation. She smiled and waved at him as she crossed the room. _I hope I don’t look like I just ran a marathon, because I definitely feel like I did._ She sat down across from him and silently urged her butterflies in her stomach to settle down.

“Hey,” she said awkwardly. Her mind buzzed with at least a million other, more interesting things to say, but “hey” was the best she could manage for now. The two of them had hours to go over the rest.

He smiled back at her and the butterflies took flight again. “Hey.”

  
  
  


**The adventures of the _USS Babel_ will continue...**


End file.
